Tag Archives: haiti

U.S. won’t take climate refugees displaced by Hurricane Dorian

by ChesterRi Posted on September 13, 2019

President Trump’s ongoing war on migrants and refugees has extended to the Bahamas, where some residents say they’ve received little to no help from their own government after Hurricane Dorian absolutely devastated the area less than two weeks ago. The storm, which hit the islands as a Category 5 hurricane, killed at least 50 people (though that number is expected to rise, as more than 1,000 people are still missing).

While the United States has granted temporary protected status, or TPS, to natural disaster victims in the past, the Trump administration has decided not to extend the designation to Bahamas residents who were displaced by the monster storm. That means Bahamians can still travel to the U.S. temporarily if they have a travel visa, but they will not be granted work permits.

TPS is a form of humanitarian relief intended for people from designated countries where war, famine, natural disaster, or other crises make it difficult for people to return home safely. People with TPS can generally stay in the U.S. for a period ranging from six and 18 months, but the Department of Homeland Security can extend this time if conditions in their home country remain unstable. Those protected under TPS are granted work permits, allowing them to support themselves while living in the U.S. Created by the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS has protected immigrants from 22 countries at various times.

“Generally, under circumstances like this really catastrophic hurricane … TPS would be granted,” the Migration Policy Institute’s Doris Meissner told the Washington Post. The U.S. has over the years offered TPS to residents of Haiti and Nepal after earthquakes devastated those countries in 2010 and 2015 respectively, as well as in South Sudan and Venezuela following armed conflicts in those countries. In the late 1990s, Honduras and Nicaragua were designated for TPS after Hurricane Mitch killed more than 11,000 people in Central America.

One of the Trump administration’s main immigration goals has been to overhaul how the U.S. grants legal immigration status. It envisions a “merit-based” immigration system in which individual immigrants are selected based on their education level, relevant professional skills, and financial self-sufficiency. But critics say the administration is setting the bar so high that many Americans couldn’t pass it.

Trump’s goal of limiting legal immigration has run afoul of many longstanding U.S. immigration policies, but TPS might be the biggest affront to his vision of merit-based entry. Not only does the program extend legal protections to people who want to enter the U.S. based entirely on what’s happening in their home countries, but it also applies to people, whether they are tourists or undocumented immigrants, who are already in the U.S. when TPS is granted. As such, it came as no surprise to some humanitarian workers in Washington that this administration would not be continuing the tradition of offering a temporary home to Bahamians fleeing the storm.

The impacts of Trump’s new TPS approach will likely extend far beyond the hurricane season. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, it’s likely that ever-larger numbers of environmental refugees will be forced to leave their homes behind in search of safety. According to a new report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, for example, 7 million people worldwide were displaced by natural disasters in the first six months of 2019 — “the highest mid-year figure ever reported for displacements associated with disasters.” But with the White House closing off avenues for migrants hoping for respite in the U.S., those climate refugees will see their options shrink just as they need help the most.

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U.S. won’t take climate refugees displaced by Hurricane Dorian

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Trump Administration Leaves 50,000 Haitians in Legal Limbo

by KristopODH Posted on May 22, 2017

Mother Jones

About 50,000 Haitians living in the United States will remain in limbo for another six months. The Trump administration has reportedly granted a temporary extension of these Haitians’ legal status, leaving them at risk of being forced to leave the country—or remain illegally—at the start of next year.

Multiple reports on Monday indicate that the Department of Homeland Security will extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals for six months. Haitians were granted the special status in 2010, after an earthquake leveled buildings, displaced millions, and killed an estimated 300,000 people. As Mother Jones previously reported, TPS is granted to people from countries experiencing humanitarian crises:

First introduced in 1990, the TPS program provides humanitarian relief to nationals of countries coping with a severe conflict or natural disaster. By providing recipients with legal status and work authorization, TPS designations—typically granted in six- to 18-month cycles that can be renewed indefinitely—have become a crucial means of aiding people who face unsafe conditions should they be sent back to their home country.

The extension was first reported on Monday by the Washington Post and confirmed by the Miami Herald, which wrote that Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) received a call from DHS with news of the decision. DHS not not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.

With the extension, Haiti’s TPS designation will continue past its current July expiration date, to January 22, 2018. The six-month extension aligns with the recommendation of James McCament, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, who wrote a memo to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in April suggesting that Haiti’s TPS designation be extended to the beginning of 2018 and then allowed to expire. Immigration advocates had strongly encouraged DHS to extend the designation for a full 18 months, arguing that Haiti needed more time to recover before thousands of people could return to the country safely.

Prior to the decision, some 50,000 Haitians living and working in the United States were at risk of being deported back to Haiti, which is dealing with a multitude of conflicts—or staying in the United States and becoming undocumented. The latest extension means that Haitians with TPS can breathe for now but will face the same suspense in November, when DHS must again decide whether to extend their TPS or allow it to expire.

Immigration advocates had mixed reactions to the news. “The fear was that we may not even get six months,” says Nana Brantuo, policy manager for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, one of the groups that has called for an extension of Haiti’s TPS designation. But she adds, “The 18-month extension is what we need. Otherwise we’re going to have thousands of people who are unauthorized in fear of being deported.”

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Trump Administration Leaves 50,000 Haitians in Legal Limbo

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James Baldwin Was Never Your Negro

by HongWhiteside Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In the eyes of filmmaker Raoul Peck, the voice of author James Baldwin has been largely forgotten in the 30 years since his death. Yet Baldwin’s words remain uniquely relevant today.

I Am Not Your Negro, Peck’s Oscar-nominated documentary, which hits selected theaters this week, recounts Baldwin’s incisive examination of the systemic racism that underpins the black American experience. The film—based on letters, published work, and notes from Remember This House, Baldwin’s unpublished manuscript about his contemporaries Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.—also serves as a critique on how Hollywood has clouded the bitter reality that African Americans faced in their struggle for civil rights.

Peck, a Haitian-born director whose previous work includes Lumumba (a biopic of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba) and Fatal Assistance (a film about Haiti’s efforts to rebuild after its devastating 2010 earthquake), spent a decade working on I Am Not Your Negro. He wrote Baldwin’s estate asking for permission to the intellectual’s archives. One day, during the course of his team’s research, Baldwin’s sister Gloria Karefa-Smart handed him pages of notes from Remember This House. “For a filmmaker, it was like almost a mystery book. I knew I could build on that,” Peck told me.

What unfolds in the film, over the course of 90 minutes, is a revival of Baldwin’s decades-old meditation on race in America, whose fraught history—given the rise of white nationalism in parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement—is no less poignant today. I caught up with Peck to discuss Baldwin’s legacy, the absurdity of Twitter, and how Hollywood has twisted our view of race.

Mother Jones: What drew you to this project?

Raoul Peck: I decided to go back to Baldwin because of the role he played in my whole life and because we have forgotten about him. I felt that the world, and in particular this country, were going in circles. What had happened 40 or 50 years ago was happening again, but even in a worse form—that we were sinking into a lot of ignorance and a lot of superficial change.

It was really always about bringing back Baldwin’s words in all their rawness, in all their impact—in the way he analyzes not only this country but also the history of this country, the images that this country is fabricating through Hollywood, and what consequence that has in our imagination.

MJ: How did Baldwin influence your life?

RP: Don’t forget: In the ’70s, when I was a young man, there were not many authors as a black young man where you felt at home, where you felt he’s really speaking about my life and my story. Baldwin was a revelation for me, the kind of revelation that follows you all your life because you can go back to it. It’s not just about stories. It’s about philosophy. It’s about criticizing the world. It’s about deconstructing the world around you. Baldwin explained that you have your own history, and that you cannot be responsible, for example, for slavery. You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.

You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this. It’s not because of you—it’s because of them. This is a powerful thing for a young mind. Which brings us to today. Can you imagine in 2016 there is a discussion about #OscarsSoWhite? Is it a novelty we’ve just discovered that the whole production machine is dominated by only one type of human being, excluding women, excluding gays, excluding minorities? This is not new. So why would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream—or out of the nightmare.

MJ: What influence would you say Hollywood has had in shaping how we think about race?

RP: Baldwin basically shows you how! From a young age, he’s watching all those different films. He’s watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That’s the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That’s the ambivalence of Hollywood. It thinks of itself of selling one thing but it doesn’t see that, by doing that, it is also selling something else.

Your job as a critic is to question that. Otherwise, you’re just part of the machine. Baldwin looks you in the eyes and says, “You are part of the problem. What do you choose to do?”

We are in it together whether you like it or not. It’s the same history. You can choose to not see the whole of it, or to see one particular aspect of it, but it’s your own delusion. You can’t erase the reality of this country.

MJ: What was Baldwin’s role during the civil rights movement?

RP: Baldwin was a celebrity. A TV show like Kenneth Clark could put him aside of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He was, at least, one of the three most important spokesmen of the movement and of the black community. He was one of greatest intellectuals of his time. He was an important voice, period, not an important black voice. Over the years, he disappeared—like a lot of our leaders disappear. He was not assassinated, but somehow he went through those assassinations as if it was himself. I think that broke him as well. You could see that in the way he carried himself in the film. He doesn’t take anything lightly.

Today, I don’t even think that people like him are possible. He would not have that much room. The system gives you two minutes to phrase a whole history. Take the example of the current president. He tells you something in two or three sentences. Then you have maybe 30 seconds to respond. You already lost because every single word of what he said is either false or not correctly accurate. You would spend the next hour to deconstruct what he just said before you can even start telling your own opinion on that. It’s the rhetorical battle that you can not win.

Baldwin would have been extremely complicated today because he would not have 40 minutes like he had at the Dick Cavett Show. It says something about our current situation where we are so bombarded with items, with data, with pseudo-information that you don’t even have the time to seek through it to see what is important, what is not, what is fake, what is real. You need to react. That’s the absurdity of Twitter. You can react without thinking now. Your tweet is as important as if you would have written a Ph.D. dissertation on the subject.

MJ: What do you see as Baldwin’s significance as we transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump?

RP: It means almost nothing. Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he’s going to be the president of. This is his response. We just experienced that it is true. It’s not having elected Obama. It’s about what country he was the president of. We just got the response.

It’s never about one individual capable of changing everything. It’s about us, every one of us—whether white or black or Latino or women or men. It’s about how you get together and have a sufficiently wide spectrum of citizens who are ready, who have the same diagnostic, or at least who agree on the minimum of the diagnostic and decide to change it.

We have to change it on the basis of reality, not on the basis of what you think is reality—which is based on your ignorance. It’s incredible because we actually have a president who is denying the existence of science, who relies on hearsay. Anybody who has zero credibility and tells him something that he feels could be true through his own prejudice, he just decides that it’s the truth. It doesn’t count that you’ve worked 40 years of your life on the very subject, that you have measured that problem, you have statistics about that problem, you have numbers and facts. All this doesn’t mean anything. That’s the bottom of ignorance right there. That’s the world we are in. Baldwin is needed even more today because he helps you focus to the essential, to what is important.

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James Baldwin Was Never Your Negro

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Terrifying Photos From Hurricane Matthew

by reubenjuj516 Posted on October 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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As many Americans were focused on the increasingly bruising presidential campaign, Hurricane Matthew moved up the eastern seaboard over the weekend, bringing flooding and devastation with it. Matthew, which was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone Sunday, has left at least 23 people dead in the United States; it killed 1,000 people in Haiti after slamming into the Caribbean nation last week.

Here are some harrowing photos and videos of the destruction:

Haiti

Cuba

The Bahamas

Florida

Georgia

South Carolina

North Carolina

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Terrifying Photos From Hurricane Matthew

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Tonight’s debate shouldn’t ignore Hurricane Matthew.

by NorbertMcdaniel Posted on October 9, 2016

Six of the eight U.S. senators from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas are climate deniers, rejecting the consensus of 99.98 percent of peer-reviewed scientific papers that human activity is causing global warming. The exceptions are South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Florida’s Bill Nelson — the lone Democrat of the bunch.

Here are some of the lowlights from their comments on the climate change:

-Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who does not understand the difference between climate and weather, arguing against climate action in a presidential debate in March: “As far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather, there’s no such thing.”

-Back in 2011, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr said: “I have no clue [how much of climate change is attributable to human activity], and I don’t think that science can prove it.”

-In 2014, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis claimed that “the liberal agenda, the Obama agenda, the [then Sen.] Kay Hagan agenda, is trying to use [climate change] as a Trojan horse for their energy policy.”

-Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson offered his analysis  last year on whether the Greenland ice sheet is melting (it is): “There are mixed reviews on that, and there’s mixed scientific evidence on that.”

-Georgia Sen. David Perdue told Slate in 2014 that “in science, there’s an active debate going on,” about whether carbon emissions are behind climate change.

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Tonight’s debate shouldn’t ignore Hurricane Matthew.

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Why Is There No Code Name for the ISIS Bombing Campaign?

by DamienCorser Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

I learned something new today: code names for military operations only became a public thing after World War II, and it was only around 1980 that the names of major operations got turned into serious PR exercises. Paul Waldman runs down all the recent hits:

Operation Urgent Fury (invasion of Grenada, 1983)
Operation Just Cause (invasion of Panama, 1989)
Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm (Kuwait/Iraq, 1989)

Operation Restore Hope (Somalia, 1993)
Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti, 1994)
Operation Deliberate Force (NATO bombing of Bosnia, 1995)
Operation Desert Fox (bombing of Iraq, 1998)
Operation Noble Anvil (the American component of NATO bombing in Kosovo, which was itself called Operation Allied Force, 1999)
Operation Infinite Justice (first name for Afghanistan war, 2001)
Operation Enduring Freedom (second name for Afghanistan war, 2001)
Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003)
Operation Odyssey Dawn (bombing of Libya, 2011)

Aside from the fact that we have twelve of these things in just the past 30 years, Waldman points out that Republican names (in bold) are considerably more martial than Democratic names:

Even though it’s the military that chooses these names, you might notice that the ones during Republican administrations have a particularly testosterone-fueled feel to them, while most of the Democratic ones are a little more tentative. Something like Operation Uphold Democracy just doesn’t have the same oomph as, say, Operation Urgent Fury. If the Obama administration had really wanted to get people excited about fighting ISIS, they should have called it Operation Turgid Thrusting or Operation Boundless Glory.

Oddly, though, it turns out that the ISIS campaign doesn’t even have any name at all. I guess that’s a good sign.

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Why Is There No Code Name for the ISIS Bombing Campaign?

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Did Slavery Create Modern Medicine?

by kx0bq6uuw Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—as many as 300,000 died—when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.'”

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.

Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property—their slaves (that is, themselves)—or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80 percent of the government budget was still going to service this debt.

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Did Slavery Create Modern Medicine?

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

by al36olu Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the US-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of US Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore. There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the US southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States.

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

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