New York Times: “Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees’”

Photo by Rainforest Action Network / Creative Commons. Chris Chaisson of the United Houma Nation eyes the waves as water covers half the road to Isle de Jean Charles in the Louisiana bayou.

The US government is assisting a new kind of refugee—this time from within our own borders. Residents of Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles, which has seen extensive flooding and erosion by hurricanes and extreme weather as well as damage by oil and logging industries, are recipients of a grant by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to help communities respond to climate change. While HUD is also providing grants to communities to build stronger levees, dams, and drainage systems, with Isle de Jean, the agency is attempting to relocate an entire community. With the grant, the island’s residents will be resettled by 2022 to a drier community that is still to be determined. “We see this as setting a precedent for the rest of the country, the rest of the world,” Marion McFadden, who is overseeing the HUD program, tells the New York Times.

The resettlement program, which is completely voluntary, is not without difficulty. There are not only logistical and practical issues but also personal and moral dilemmas. “We’re going to lose all our heritage, all our culture,” Chief Albert Naquin of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, one of the island’s tribes, says to the New York Times. “It’s all going to be history.” Hilton Chaisson, who raised ten sons on the island and wants his twenty-six grandchildren to also have the option to stay, concedes the flooding is getting worse, but says they always find a way. “I’ve lived my whole life here, and I’m going to die here,” he says.

The New York Times explains the history of the island:

For over a century, the American Indians on the island fished, hunted, trapped and farmed among the lush banana and pecan trees that once spread out for acres. But since 1955, more than 90 percent of the island’s original land mass has washed away. Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island, and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments. Some of the island was swept away by hurricanes…Already, the homes and trailers bear the mildewed, rusting scars of increasing floods. The fruit trees are mostly gone or dying thanks to saltwater in the soil. Few animals are left to hunt or trap.

With raising sea levels, stronger storms, increased flooding, hasher droughts, and decreased freshwater supplies, governments around the world are dealing with climate change that could potentially displace 50 million to 200 million from their homes. Climatologist say that Syria's drought, exacerbated by climate change, destroyed crops, killed livestock, and displaced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers, and contributed to the social turmoil that led to the country’s devastating civil war, which created even more refugees. Climatologists believe the same could happen in other parts of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and other parts of the world. Climate change is already affecting islands in the Pacific Ocean, where some islands and its residents are dealing with rising sea levels.  

“The changes are underway and they are very rapid,” US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell says in a speech. “We will have climate refugees.” Walter Kaelin, the head of the Nansen Initiative, a research organization working with the United Nations to address extreme-weather displacement, tells the New York Times that planning ahead is essential. “You don’t want to wait until people have lost their homes, until they flee and become refugees,” he says. “The idea is to plan ahead and provide people with some measure of choice.”

This is exactly what HUD officials are hoping to do with the climate refugees of Isle de Jean. While there are those who don’t wish to move, some of the island’s residents are eager to relocate. Violet Handon Parfait lives with her husband and two children in a small trailer behind the remains of their house, destroyed by Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Floods ruined their stove and family computer, and Parfait, who has lupus, tells the New York Times she is concerned about access to doctors if the bridge connecting them to the mainland floods. She also hopes her two children are able to attend college, but they often miss their school when the flooding prevents the bus from picking them up. “I just want to get out of here,” she says.

Springtime in Firenzi

Taking a short break from meetings in London, I visited the beautiful city of Florence. The Piazzale Michelangelo, in the Oltrarno district of the city, features an incredible panoramic view of the city. You can see the Duomo, aka the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, a vast Gothic structure with the Renaissance dome added later. To the left is the Campanile and over the Arno River is the city's most well known bridge, Ponte Vecchio, featuring houses and many jewelry stores. Maybe I'll pick up some presents for the office…

VOX: “The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today's immigration problem”

Immigration reform is sorely needed, as many activists, immigration practitioners, and (certain) politicians have been saying for the last few years. But how did we get into this immigration mess in the first place? Vox explains the 1996 immigration bill signed by President Bill Clinton that overhauled immigration enforcement in the US and consequently led to the massive deportations ongoing today as well as the huge increase in the number of undocumented immigrants in the US. This 1996 bill, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (called IIRIRA), produced key changes in American immigration law and enforcement policies.

The bill made more people eligible for deportation (i.e. removal)

Legal immigrants—including Green Card holders—can be deported if they're convicted of certain crimes, but in 1996, Congress retroactively expanded the crimes which made immigrants eligible for deportation.  "Overnight people who had formed their lives here—came here legally or had adjusted to legal status, were working here, building their families, had ordinary lives in which they were on the PTA and everything else—suddenly, because of some conviction, weren't even allowed to go in front of a judge anymore,” Nancy Moravetz, a NYU law professor, tells Vox. “They were just fast-tracked to deportation."

The bill made it easier to deport and detain undocumented immigrants

Not only did IIRIRA allow immigrants convicted of certain crimes to be deported, it permitted undocumented immigrants apprehended within 100 miles of the border to be stripped of the ability to argue their case before a judge before getting deported. It also required the government to hold more immigrants in detention before deporting them, which makes it much more difficult to get legal representation, and decreased the discretion immigration judges and the executive branch had regarding removals. "Discretion was taken away from district directors and immigration judges almost entirely," Doris Meissner, former head of Immigration and Naturalization Service (now US Citizenship & Immigration Services), tells Vox. "And so deportations started to go up, people were deported who otherwise would not have been deported."

IIRIRA made it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status

 As Vox explains, for much of the 20th century, certain undocumented immigrants were able to obtain legal status once they'd been in the US for a certain period of time. Before the law changed, in 1996, immigrants who had been in the US for at least seven years could obtain legal status if they showed it would cause them "extreme hardship" to be deported. IIRIRA changed this by limiting "cancellation of removal" to immigrants who were able to show that they had been in the US for at least ten years, and who had a US citizen (such as a child or spouse) who would suffer "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship," if the foreign national was removed from the US.  This was a higher standard than the previous “extreme hardship” which only the foreign national themselves had to suffer. Moreover, the US would only grant cancellation of removal to 3,000 immigrants each year. IIRAA went further to also essentially eliminate one of the most common ways to gain citizenship. Vox explains:

Marrying a US citizen or permanent resident makes you eligible to apply for a green card. So does having an immediate relative who's a US citizen (like a child), as long as the citizen's over 18. These are true whether or not you already live in the US. And before IIRIRA, it was true regardless of whether or not you were legal to begin with. Starting after IIRIRA passed in 1996, though, an unauthorized immigrant couldn't directly apply for legal status — even if he had married a US citizen, or qualified for a green card through a relative. Immigrants were banished for at least three years if they'd lived in the US without papers for six months; the banishment lasted 10 years if the immigrant had lived in the US without papers for a year or more.

Applicants can apply for a waiver to the 3- and 10-year bars only if they leave the country first, making it too risky of a proposition for many. After IIRIRA, although deportations from the United States increased, the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US also increased dramatically, going from five million in 1996 to twelve million by 2006.  

The 3- and 10-year bars, Vox says, has “caused millions of immigrants to remain unauthorized who'd otherwise be eligible for green cards or US citizenship by now.” According to Douglas Massey's estimate, without the 3- and 10-year bars, there would be 5.3 million fewer undocumented immigrants in the US today. "I don't think people fully appreciated what those laws had done," Nancy Morawetz tells Vox, referring to both IIRIRA and other 1996 immigration laws. In some ways, they're "still being sorted out today."

Not Your Chippy’s Fish and Chips

Even though they were not served in paper, I still enjoyed these fish and chips, actually goujons and chips, while in London for meetings at the Goring Hotel. This Edwardian hotel, where Kate Middleton stayed before she married Prince William, has a royal warrant and is conveniently only a nine-minute walk from Buckingham Palace. And there is an award-winning afternoon tea served, which is wonderful. Lunch over, I am off to find their “gin garden."

NY Times: “Inshallah Is Good for Everyone”

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a college student at UC Berkeley and a refugee from Iraq, was about to take off on a flight from Los Angeles to Oakland when he called his uncle to tell him about a dinner event he attended the previous evening featuring U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. As he spoke to his uncle in Arabic, he noticed one passenger staring at him, and after Makhzoomi hung up, he was escorted off the plane and questioned by the airline and FBI about "threatening comments,” according to a statement by Southwest Airlines.

Although Southwest Airline’s statement claimed that Makhzoomi was removed for the “content of the passenger’s conversation” and not his language choice, Makhzoomi believes it was a clear case of discrimination and Islamaphobia. What did he say before the passenger alerted the airline? Apart from telling his uncle about the event, where he was able to ask the secretary-general a question about defeating ISIS, he explained, he signed off with the Arabic expression “inshallah,” which translates as “God willing.”

Wajahat Ali, author of the play The Domestic Crusaders and creative director of Affinis Labs, a hub for social entrepreneurship and innovation, elucidates the meaning of “inshallah” and its general use for Arabic speakers, calling it the “hallmark of the Arabic vernacular.” He writes:

Inshallah is the Arabic version of “fuggedaboudit.” It’s similar to how the British use the word “brilliant” to both praise and passive-aggressively deride everything and everyone. It transports both the speaker and the listener to a fantastical place where promises, dreams and realistic goals are replaced by delusional hope and earnest yearning.

Examples of how “inshallah” is used in conversation: 

If you are a parent, you can employ inshallah to either defer or subtly crush the desires of young children.

Boy: “Father, will we go to Toys ‘R’ Us later today?”

Father: “Yes. Inshallah.”

Translation: “There is no way we’re going to Toys ‘R’ Us. I’m exhausted. Play with the neighbor’s toys. Here, play with this staple remover. That’s fun, isn’t it?”

Ali summarizes, tongue-in-check, that “inshallah is used in Muslim-majority communities to escape introspection, hard work and strategic planning and instead outsource such responsibilities to an omnipotent being, who somehow, at some time, will intervene and fix our collective problems.”

In recent months, those problems have included numerous incidents of alleged discrimination against Arabic speakers and “Muslim-looking” peoples including Sikhs while flying or attempting to board airplanes. Earlier this year, three Muslims and a Sikh filed a lawsuit after being removed from a flight because the captain of the airplane did not feel comfortable with them as passengers. In November, two men were nearly prevented from boarding a Southwest flight because a few passengers heard them speaking Arabic and were afraid to fly with them.  While there are many more similiar incidents, perhaps there is a silver lining in this latest one, Ali writes: “Opportunity is often born from absurdities. I believe this latest episode is actually a great moment to bring the versatile and glorious term inshallah into the vocabulary of more Americans.”