Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

Program News

• New Sproul Fellow Troy Vettese explores relationship between capitalism and energy extraction

• Program director Hidetaka Hirota quoted in Globe & Mail article on US immigration crackdown

Local News

• CBS Bay Area: Why a Silicon Valley software engineer is heading back to Canada

PROGRAM NEWS

New Sproul Fellow Troy Vettese Explores Relationship Between Capitalism and Energy Extraction

The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Dr. Troy Vettese has been awarded the John A. Sproul Visiting Scholar Fellowship for Spring 2026. The Fellowship provides supplementary support to postdoctoral fellows who are studying Canada while in residence at UC Berkeley.

Dr. Vettese is an environmental historian and a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. He studies Canadian history, with a focus on the tar sands industry and conservative environmental thought. He is interested in understanding what the shift from conventional to non-conventional oil means in terms of how capitalism relates to the Earth, with resources increasingly “made” rather than “found”. He is also writing a book on neoliberal environmental thought, titled Business Climate, that will focus on the contribution of Canadian economists to applying Hayekian principles to problems of “externality”, which eventually led to the intellectual breakthrough of cap-and-trade in the 1960s.

Dr. Vettese studied history as an undergraduate at McGill University and then completed two master’s degrees at the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at New York University, which traced the history of neoliberal environmental thought. Since graduating in 2019, Dr. Vettese has held fellowships at Harvard University; the European University Institute; Copenhagen University; and the New Institute, Hamburg. His research has been supported by the DAAD, the University of Chicago, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the Independent Social Research Foundation. His first book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), was co-authored with climate scientist Drew Pendergrass and has been translated into half a dozen languages.

As a Sproul fellow, Dr. Vettese will organize a workshop in the spring of 2026 on the energy transition to non-conventional fossil fuels that will put the Canadian experience into a comparative perspective. Several leading energy scholars will contribute papers to the workshop, which will then be submitted together for a forum at an interdisciplinary journal. The aim of the forum is to reinvigorate energy studies, divine new directions for the field to travel, and relate developments in Canada to a broader global perspective.

Program Director Hidetaka Hirota Quoted in Globe and Mail Article on US Immigration Crackdown

Canadian Studies Program director Hidetaka Hirota was quoted in an article published in The Globe and Mail Saturday. The article, “Trump administration steps up immigration crackdown with multiple new measures“, recounts the various policy changes made by the present US administration to tighten entry requirements for foreign nationals, including both immigrants and tourists.

Professor Hirota compares the administration’s new policies, such as an indefinite ban on immigration from nineteen countries, to late 19th- and early 20th-century immigration law. During that time, the US suspended immigration of Chinese laborers. After 1924, US immigration law operated under a discriminatory quota system, intended to maintain the racial composition of the United States and discourage the immigration of people deemed “undesirable”. The US abolished this unequal quota system in 1965. (Similar policies were also in force in Canada during this period, before being scrapped in favor of the points system in 1967.)

Professor Hirota explained how such policies were organized around a “core concept {of) racial hierarchy of desirability” that informed which populations would be welcomed, and which would be excluded. The article points out that such rhetoric is echoed by the current administration, with the President complaining that the US has too much immigration from “disaster” countries like Somalia instead of Norway or Sweden.

Yet while the US administration has gone farther than many countries in rhetoric and policy, it is only the most prominent example among a global backlash against migration sweeping from Europe to South America. Even famously immigrant-friendly Canada has seen a “cratering” in public support for immigration, and the Carney government has made high-profile cuts to immigration targets, calling the Trudeau-era high-water mark “unstainable”. However, while the Canadian backlash does have its own particular racial dynamics – largely felt among the South Asian population – Canadian leaders insist that the discontent is simply a response to the number of newcomers, and does not represent a fundamental nativistic or xenophobic impulse among the Canadian public.

LOCAL NEWS

A job in Silicon Valley is the career pinnacle for tech workers around the world. About 66% of Bay Area tech workers are foreign-born, and competition for such jobs is fierce. Yet even as the US tightens the screws on skilled immigrants with policies like a $100k fee for new H1-B visas, the country’s political climate is causing some immigrants to reconsider their options. As CBS News Bay Area reports, such is the case for Hesham Alshaebi, a Yemeni-born tech worker who is packing up to return to Canada – voluntarily.

Alshaebi completed a software engineering degree at Carleton University and obtained a permanent residency for himself and his family in Canada. However, he always dreamed of working in Silicon Valley; a dream that came true three years ago, when he moved to California after landing a job with a major tech company.

However, Alshaebi says he quickly became disillusioned with the United States because of the government’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and its support of wars in the Middle East, including his native Yemen. Alshaebi, who previously considered moving his family to join him in San Francisco, says it is important to him to live in a country that “more closely aligns with his personal beliefs”. While he is giving up financial and job security to return to Canada, he says that his “moral compass” is pointing him north.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Philosophy Hall #2308

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