I came into Canada in 2018 and applied for PR in 2019. I didn’t get it until recently, I faced a lot of delays in and with the system.

A lot changed post-COVID that made it easier to get in, such as:

• increasing the number of folks admitted for PR (as per https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/april-2022/immigration-increase-pandemic/ ) meaning that you could get in more easily with a lower score

• post graduate work permits becoming renewable

• a new policy to allow some students to apply straight for PR - those lucky enough to apply fast enough anyways (you might remember that this is the one that became full on the first day it was open)

Not to mention US-focused changes like opening the door for H1b visa holders, https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/work-canada/permit/h1b.html

There were provincial changes too, like Ontario dropping the three month waiting period so you could get OHIP right away as soon as you met other eligibility requirements.

Had these changes been implemented during orange voldemort’s term, instead of Biden’s, I recon we’d have seen the same increase. (Why the wait by Canada on doing this? Well it always takes time to get a new policy off the ground, and with COVID becoming a serious threat in March 2020 and the vaccine only making it to Canada in April 2021, if anything these changes seem to have come in absurdly fast.)

You’re … welcome?

• from a USian who voted for Harris and is preparing to take the Canadian citizenship test early next year

Absolutely. Wish I could do the same.

As a practical matter I expect it’s less US citizens, or even those with green cards, who try to come over, and more folks who haven’t yet obtained regular status in the US.

USian here - this honestly took far too long for me to get.

TIL! Yep, that gives the EU exactly what’s needed to suspend them from Schengen.

So I just answered my own question. I was confused by this,

If those crossing claim asylum, the RCMP cannot send them back to the United States.

Because I thought the Safe Third Country Agreement allowed them to be sent back with no right to be heard for asylum (unless they stuck in and evaded detection for 14 days).

However, according to https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/safe-third-country-agreement-expansion-causes-asylum-seekers-explore-new-routes

Asylum seekers are arriving at airports with tourist visas and petitioning for asylum at immigration offices after their arrival. The number of asylum applications made at airports in Montreal and Toronto have tripled since the beginning of 2023.
Overall, the expansion decreased the flow of asylum seekers coming from the United States directly but has not worked to decrease the flow of asylum seekers into Canada.

So I guess to get into Canada they’d leave the US and fly in from another country somehow.

Hmm. Could they legally kick Hungary out of Schengen without its approval?

Agreements outside of the EU framework - now that is indeed a clever workaround. I seem to recall similar maneuvers during the Greek financial crisis when the UK wouldn’t agree to things.

What I fear is that he’s technically right - because he’ll use Hungary’s position as an EU member to tear up and otherwise interfere with EU attempts to fund Ukraine (something he’s not able to do to the US) and do it well enough that Ukraine’s position in it’s war of self-defense is seriously compromised.

It really and truly sucks, but, I mean, unfortunately, it’s not like they’re not wrong…

The best we can hope for is that Europe can unify over this and together with the Commonwealth of Nations, they’ll be strong enough to keep up the good fight. But it’s definitely a major blow.

I guess they back either other up. Like archive.is is able to take archives from archive.org but the saved page reflects the original URL and the original archiving time from the wayback machine (though it also notes the URL used from wayback itself plus the time they got archived it from wayback).

Ah, that makes sense. So the FediDB info seems to be wrong - I wonder if they got confused by cloudflare as per the other comment in https://feddit.org/post/4529920/2993842 ?

Also, is there a way to let them know to update it? I guess someone could report an issue on github…

That confuses me too. I’ve never really understood that. Likewise, /m/news is for US news while world news goes into /m/world and US news isn’t allowed.

Maybe that’s another reason why folks thing it’s US-based - because the magazines are clearly so US oriented. But I’m not sure how that happened.

On the brain bin for example it’s PoliticsUSA - https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticsUSA

The other thing is that I recall that kbin.social exploded and got a huge chuck of the exodus - but now that it’s been effectively dead for half a year, those users mostly seem to have vanished.

A fraction clearly did migrate to other mbin and lemmy instances. It seems like the rest did not return to spez’s site from what I’m hearing (“all the posts I’m seeing there are complaining that only bots are active here”) but I’m not sure where they went. But for example, one person I was following seems to have dropped off entirely from the fediverse and all social media.

Why did you think lemmy.world was US based? It’s fully European.

But that’s probably it - folks assume the instance that’s for the whole world is the US-based one and don’t feel the need to make another major US-based one.

Came here to say that. I wasn’t covered by GDPR under spez’s site - but luckily their policies treated me like I was anyways.

I moved to kbin.social - which was probably the 2nd largest after lemmy.world. Also, it was Polish.

What I liked about that was - as per my understanding - since these are hosted in the EU, the GDPR applies to my data here even if I’m not the EU myself and am not an EU citizen.

With a tld ending like .world you’d think it’s for the whole world, not just europe (.eu) or a specific country.

feddit.org itself is a bit of a curiosity since the .org doesn’t make it obvious that it is German - but someone posted the full story of how feddit.de fell apart and feddit.org became the successor.

What’s interesting is that currently, the site is broken, but in the footer you can see the last set of magazines that were new.

Which means the database is still intact, and if not a full resurrection, we could get our data back at least (I lost a lot of content when kbin.social went down). Just gotta figure out who to contact - which company is actually maintaining or hosting the servers that kbin.social run on…

What’s your current kbin instance? Curious to see if it’s running mbin now or if it really is the original kbin on there still.

Also, anyone remember kbin.cafe ?

Yeah, that chart needs to be updated. AFAIK no instance is still on kbin, everything has gone to mbin. It’s also missing pyfedi/piefed

As far as I can tell there’s been no communication from him for several months and not since he posted saying he’d turn kbin.social over to a new admin.

But the domain for kbin.social was recently renewed (I posted full details over at https://fedia.io/m/fediverse/t/1403334/Any-updates-on-kbin-social-recently ) which gives me hope that ernest is still around, just a bit more behind the scenes.

Of course, it could also be that the domain was simply auto-renewed (as described in https://www.godaddy.com/en-ca/help/turn-my-domain-auto-renew-on-or-off-41085 ). I think some registrars or services even offer prepayment options for auto-renewing, meaning that ernest might have set this all up before he disappeared, rather than slowly reappearing now…