Search Results for: Obama

Finding True North

Illustration by Kevin Whipple

Amy Bracken | Longreads | August 2018 | 27 minutes (6,729 words)

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all. They’ll be considered as evidence when he goes before a Canadian immigration judge and he’ll have to tell the story that still makes his voice shake, about how gunmen attacked him at a Port-au-Prince intersection in 2013 and left him for dead. As a young police officer, he had witnessed men transporting weapons and drugs hidden in a truckload of plantains. Two of Samuel’s colleagues who were also present at the time have since been killed, he says, and when Samuel was shot at again in 2015 while taking his children to school, he knew he “had to leave Haiti.”

Thus begins the story of how Samuel, his wife, Darline, and their 1-year-old boy found themselves in a basement apartment on a chilly fall day in a quiet neighborhood of Montréal. They are part of a massive influx of asylum-seekers — mostly Haitian — who fled the United States for Canada last summer. They came at the peak of that influx, in early August 2017, when every day more than 200 people took a bus to upstate New York, then a taxi to the border, where a country road ends in grass and a well-worn dirt path. They breached the invisible boundary and turned themselves in to a Canadian Mountie, setting in motion the long process of trying to start a new life in a new country.

The urge for so many to leave the United States began to build with the election of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Then, in spring 2017, John Kelly, Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians would expire in January 2018. TPS had been granted to some 50,000 Haitians living in the United States, protecting them from deportation, after a massive earthquake struck their country in 2010. Although Secretary Kelly said that renewal of TPS was possible, he suggested it was unlikely, and he urged recipients “to use the time before January 22, 2018, to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States.” (In November, the Trump Administration announced that TPS for Haitians would instead end in July 2019.)


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Canada became the destination for TPS recipients and many others when, in June, social media messages encouraging Haitians to apply for residency here, some even falsely claiming that the Canadian government would cover all fees, went viral. The messages spread feverishly among Haitians across in the United States and beyond.

The number of asylum claims at the Québec border had climbed since the start of 2017, but then it shot from 975 in June to 2,775 in July, and more than doubled again to 5,650 in August. Most of those claimants were Haitian.

A so-called “safe third country” agreement between the United States and Canada, in place since 2004, means that anyone presenting himself at a U.S. border station crossing to seek asylum in Canada must be turned back — with few exceptions made for some, like those with close family ties in Canada. The rule does not apply to those who cross between official ports of entry, have themselves arrested, then apply for asylum in Canada. With much of the U.S.-Canada border dominated by lakes, rivers, and remote fields, and with much of the U.S. Haitian population based on the eastern seaboard, the accessibility of the New York–Québec stretch made it the chosen entry point for the vast majority of migrants.

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all.

As the number of irregular border-crossers mounted, public officials, service providers, and the media focused heavily on the misleading social media messages that encouraged them to come north, suggesting that deception was largely responsible for the influx and that those messages were setting migrants up for disappointment.

Indeed, most of the travelers I interviewed for this story said they had been inspired by WhatsApp and Facebook posts. One said that fellow travelers were startled by the sight of a police officer arresting people at the border, and most were unaware that in 2016, Haitian asylum claims were only accepted about 50 percent of the time.

However, newcomers’ assessments of whether or not coming to Canada was the right choice goes well beyond merely weighing the odds of getting residency or considering the fees. By other measures, there is enormous benefit in coming north.

For one, immediate deportation from Canada is unlikely for most. The fate of many who entered last summer will still be unresolved months or years from now, thanks in large part to a backlog. More than 50,000 asylum claims were made in Canada in 2017more than double the number in 2016. One result is that many saw their scheduled eligibility hearings pushed back indefinitely. A spokesperson for Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board said in February 2018 that projected hearing delays were about 20 months — despite efforts to step up capacity, such as the temporary designation of 17 Refugee Board members to focus specifically on processing the claims of recent border-crossers. The process will be longest for those whose claims are rejected, as they are entitled to appeal multiple times, dragging the process out for what might be several years.

Meanwhile, as they await a ruling on their fate, the life that Haitian asylum-seekers are able to live in Québec is often starkly different from what they had experienced in the States. Many quickly gained a foothold in Canadian society, are beginning to integrate, and are breathing easy in a way that they never could south of the border. But for some, the delays can be excruciating, for one reason above all: They prolong the time before they can send for family members they had to leave back home.

* * *

Samuel didn’t aspire to live in North America. He tried to make his way in Haiti as he was able. “I entered university but wasn’t able to finish,” he says. “I had to make a living, so I entered the police because it’s the one institution in Haiti that will hire anybody who is intelligent and physically fit.” It wasn’t a great job. He says his life was at risk on a number of occasions, yet he didn’t have a choice but to stick with it. Until he didn’t have a choice but to leave.

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

“My daughter, who was four at the time, was shocked and traumatized,” he says. “When I returned from the hospital, she wouldn’t come near me, she was so afraid of me when she saw the scars.”

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

When he was shot at the second time, the gunmen missed, but Samuel lost control of his motorcycle, throwing himself and his children to the pavement. Later, he says, “my daughter kept yelling, ‘Look, there’s the car that made us have an accident! Look at it, Daddy!’”

Like most Haitians crossing into Canada last summer, Samuel and Darline had entered the United States legally, flying in with five-year tourist visas. But they had been unable to get visas for their children, so they left them in Port-au-Prince with Darline’s mother. It was the hardest thing about being in Boston, but it was far from the only major challenge. Their visas did not allow them to work. Being broke, they couldn’t pay for an attorney to take Samuel’s asylum case — nor could they find one who would work pro bono. They couldn’t afford housing, so they stayed with a cousin until, Samuel says, “after six months, my wife and I needed to be independent, so we set out to find our own housing.” They wound up in a family homeless shelter an hour outside Boston, where they would spend the next year.

Samuel says messages kept circulating on Facebook about the promise of moving to Canada, but at first the couple ignored them, feeling that moving to a new country held too much uncertainty.

In July 2017, Samuel finally got his work permit, but Darline did not. And there was a drumbeat they could not ignore. “Trump was really applying pressure, sending messages that if you don’t have papers, you can’t stay in the country,” Samuel says. “I couldn’t return to Haiti. There was too much at stake. We decided it wasn’t worth [staying there]. We had to cross over to Canada.”

* * *

On an evening in August 2017, on a strip of highway in, Plattsburgh New York, near a Dollar Store, a Super 8 motel, and an A&W fast-food restaurant, a bus pulled into a Mobile station parking lot. Slowly, the front door opened, and a plastic toy truck tumbled down the stairs and hit the pavement. A family followed, lugging bags bursting at the seams. Then out came another, then another. About 20 Haitian men, women, and children descended from the bus and began looking around for taxis. Those days there were many more cabs than usual. After migration through the area exploded, new companies popped up, and old ones began working extra hours and longer routes. They also began charging astronomical prices. The New York Attorney General’s office fined a taxi company for charging migrants up to hundreds of dollars in excess of the going rate.

The cabs headed north on the highway, then along some country roads through vast stretches of cornfields punctuated by trailer homes, then down quiet, green, Roxham Road, until, at the end, beyond a thicket of vines and Queen Anne’s lace and signs that read Road Closed and No Pedestrians, a white canopy tent appeared. A Canadian police officer stood before it, poised like a nightclub bouncer, ready to check IDs at the door.

Matthew Turner had moved into a trailer home on Roxham Road in October 2016 and said that ever since then he’d been seeing taxis drive past his house to the dead end. Last summer it was a steady stream of cabs, often with names he’d never heard of. He said he found it annoying when cars unloaded in his driveway, especially if the travelers dropped trash. But he placed blame elsewhere. “All they’re trying to do is escape a pretty crappy system that we constructed because a blond wig got elected into office,” he said. “It’s sad, really. The whole Ellis Island thing just went out the window, and now they have to leave our country and seek it in a country that’s, honestly, at this point, better than ours.”

Turner, who lives with his wife and young son, works temp jobs, mostly loading and unloading for shipping companies. He said finding work is hard, but the best companies — in terms of safety, pay, and organization — are Canadian. He, too, imagines life to be better on the northern side of the border, in part because of universal health care.

As we spoke, a taxi marked WISH TRANSPORT passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people.

As we spoke, a taxi marked Wish Transport passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people. They formed a single-file line where the dirt path began. The middle-aged man at the back stood stiffly, clutching the handle of his zebra-print wheelie suitcase as he watched the others cross. I asked why he had come.

“I had problems in the U.S.,” he said.

“Is it because of TPS?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

In loud, slow English, the officer asked him, “Monsieur, do you speak English?”

“A little.”

“OK, this is the Canadian border right here. OK? Over there, you’re fine. As soon as you cross over here, you’ve entered Canada illegally, and you’ll be placed under arrest. OK?”

“OK.”

“Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“OK, so you decide if you want to enter Canada. If you come in here, you’re under arrest, and then whatever the consequences are, you’ll have to deal with them.”

“OK.”

With that, the man soberly approached the policeman, luggage scraping along the dirt path. The officer told him he was under arrest and had a right to an attorney. He didn’t handcuff the man, though. Instead, he pointed to a sanitizer dispenser and asked him to wash his hands, before escorting him into the tent for processing.

Where Roxham Road picks up again, as Chemin Roxham, cornfields give way to orchards and houses obscured by high hedges. At the corner, there’s a turtle-crossing sign, and the air smells of apples. From the white tent, a bus took the new arrivals down narrow country roads and across a highway to a camp at the official border crossing a few minutes away. In August 2017, with the number of new arrivals exploding, the Canadian military set up rows of green canvas tents at the official crossing, as well as at a conference center in Cornwall, Ontario, with a combined capacity of close to 2,000 people. The Canadian Red Cross was at this camp, handing out blankets and hygiene kits, assigning beds, and performing medical checks.

* * *

In late September, perhaps unaware that the military had begun dismantling the camp at the border because of a decline in the number of border-crossers, the anti-immigrant, right-wing Canadian group Storm Alliance had chosen the spot for a rally. Several dozen men and women, looking like a motorcycle gang in black clothing and bandanas, marched toward the border, between the highway and the tent camp, some waving signs with crossed out pictures of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But they were stopped short by a boisterous crowd, a bit larger than their own, of young anarchists and members of Solidarité Sans Frontières, who chanted, “Haitians in, racists out!” and held signs with slogans like Make racists afraid again, and a banner with a sketch of President Trump’s crossed-out face, and the words Resist the Far Right — some of many indications that these activists also worry about a threat from south of the border.

In the province of Québec, public sentiment about the new arrivals has been mixed. At the height of last summer’s migrant influx, a poll by the media agency SOM-Cogeco Nouvelles found that 51 percent of Québec residents believed migrants should be prevented from crossing the border into Canada. It also found that 39 percent of the Québecois surveyed believed the influx would make the province less secure.

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross. When Samuel and Darline spent a few days at the border at the height of the influx, the military camp hadn’t opened yet, and they say the government was clearly not ready for such a flood of people. For them, it meant standing in long lines for medical checks, photos, and fingerprinting. But they’re quick to add that the welcome was generally good. “They don’t push you around,” Samuel says. “They don’t handcuff you. They speak with you intelligently and in a way that you can understand. Everything went really well.”

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross.

The language helps. Although many of the Canadian police who are greeting and arresting people at the unofficial border do not speak French, most officials in Québec after that point do. And for Haitians who do not speak French, at some points there are Haitian Creole interpreters.

Last August, after spending a few hours to a few days at the border, newcomers were bused to an immigrant shelter in Montréal. Normally there is only one such shelter, a YMCA. Over the summer, 12 more were added. Now there are just four.

Samuel and his family were dropped off at the Y, where they were connected with all the information they needed about government services, such as health care, and then they went to stay at Samuel’s brother’s place in Montréal. On August 14, 12 days after crossing the border, they began getting their monthly check from the Canadian government — about $1,122 Canadian ($883, in U.S. dollars) for the family, and they began looking for their own place.

The apartment hunt was hard at first, with landlords demanding references and credit reports, but then a Turkish immigrant, who lived above a rental unit, “saw our temperament and saw what kind of people we are,” Samuel says, “and demanded neither credit nor references.” He charges $600 Canadian ($472 U.S.) for the one-bedroom. With the government stipend, it left the family a little over $400 a month for food and incidentals, but Samuel says they were used to being frugal.

It’s easy to understand the landlord’s assessment of the family. Samuel is thin, with delicate features, and a soft, contemplative air, defying any stereotype of a police officer. And when I visited, Darline smiled warmly from the couch, where she nursed a robust 1-year-old, before releasing him to trot around the living room, making eye contact with each adult before bursting into delighted laughter.

A paper banner on the otherwise blank wall proclaimed Bon Fet – a Haitian Creole birthday celebration to honor Samuel, turning 36, and his son, turning 1. The rest of the place was immaculate, with only a few objects — synthetic flowers adorning a shiny yellow varnished wood dining table.

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month. They’d also been assigned a public defender, accessed basic health care, and started getting free monthly public transportation passes. “Everything is moving much faster here,” Samuel told me last September. He knew he might never get to bring his two older children here to Canada, and that they might instead end up back in Haiti, but at the time he felt he’d placed his bet on the right country. “I don’t know tomorrow,” he said, “but I don’t regret coming to Canada, because the three of us, we’re really comfortable here.”

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month.

Two months later, in November, the couple got their work papers, and Samuel found a minimum-wage job through a temp agency, scanning orders at a clothing-rental company.

But not everything was as fast as they’d like. It took months more for Darline to find work, and the asylum eligibility interview Samuel had scheduled for December was postponed indefinitely.

Most of the new arrivals stay at shelters for their first weeks in Montréal, until they start getting their monthly check and find their own place. When the provincial government saw that the YMCA would not be enough to meet the need, it cast around to see who had space, and managers of the Olympic Park, used in the 1976 Summer Games, offered up part of the stadium to eventually accommodate 900 people in rows of cots, while all around international competitions, concerts, and the renovation of the stadium’s landmark skyline tower whirled on. Other shelters opened around town, including in an old hospital and an old convent, but it was the image of refugees — mostly from Haiti, but also from around the world (other top asylum-seeker nationalities were Nigerian, Turkish, and Syrian) — being bused to the stadium that brought in waves of international media.

It also attracted activists. An anti-immigrant demonstration to be held outside the Olympic Stadium was canceled, but a pro-immigrant counter-rally went ahead, drawing hundreds of people, many carrying Réfugiées Bienvenues signs.

The stadium stopped housing migrants in September 2017, and today, due to the drop in new arrivals, the only shelters in use are an old hospital, an unused youth center on the grounds of what feels like a leafy boarding school campus, and the YMCA near downtown.

* * *

Jesula and James moved into the Y after coming to Québec in August. Their story is starkly different from that of Samuel and Darline, but it’s not unusual among new Haitian arrivals from the United States. For them, Canada is the eleventh country — and, they hope, last — on an odyssey that began more than a decade ago.

The two were high school sweethearts in the dusty northern Haitian city of Gonaïves. James remembers relatives who lived in the States coming back to visit and being treated like royalty. “I thought the sky over the U.S. was different from the sky over other countries,” he says with a laugh. Still, he never wanted to leave Gonaïves. He excelled in school, participated in a local debate club, and played on a national youth soccer team. But after their city was virtually wiped out by floods from a tropical storm in 2004, he decided to move to the Dominican Republic to live with his mother and continue his education there. His dream was to get a medical degree and return to Haiti to help meet a desperate need for doctors.

Jesula, meanwhile, stayed in Gonaïves. In the market, she sold goods imported from Canada with the help of relatives here. Assuming she had money because of her business, she says, thieves raided her house, stole her things, and raped her.

Asked if the perpetrators were caught, she laughs bitterly and says, “In Haiti, it’s not like it is here.”

Traumatized and fearful, Jesula fled to the Dominican Republic to live with James. But things didn’t work out there either. Both lacked the funds to complete school, and both were unable to find work.

Soon Brazil beckoned. Its economy was booming, and it needed workers to prepare for the World Cup and the upcoming Summer Olympics. In 2012 James made his way there, and in 2013 Jesula joined him. “There was no stress because from the moment we got there we were so lucky,” Jesula says. “I arrived in September, and in January I had residency. Imagine how comfortable we were.” Both found jobs easily, learned Portuguese, and settled in, forging strong friendships and a sense of community. But by 2015, the Brazilian economy was in serious trouble, jobs were lost, and Haitian migrants were no longer welcome.

Like thousands of other Haitians, Jesula and James made their way north, through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, and finally to the United States. Once there, also like thousands of others, they were thrown in detention.

Their treatment by U.S. officials came as a shock. “I thought the U.S. was like Canaan, like paradise, like something out of the Bible,” James says. But as soon as they crossed the border, the couple was split up and sent to separate detention centers.

On an August afternoon in 2017, the couple sat in a park across the street from the Y, where they’d stayed for the previous four nights. Swing music blasted from a speaker nearby, and a man came over to ask if they want to join a free dance class. They politely declined.

Both said they felt at home in Canada. James dreamt of getting a doctorate in anthropology, and Jesula wanted to go to nursing school and learn to draw landscapes. She was pregnant for the third time. She’s miscarried twice — once in Brazil and once in the United States, but here she said she believed everything would work out. “I’m better here,” she said, “because I don’t like living in stress, and there [in the U.S.], the president would say something different every day, so I didn’t know where he really stood on anything. Here I can just be at peace.”

After arriving in the United States, they were detained for just a few days. They say they were lucky to be released much sooner than other Haitians, but the rest of their time in the States was hard. They moved to Boston, and eventually James got a work permit and a job, but the permit was set to expire last September, and he’d been unable to renew it. He also didn’t feel he was making progress in his asylum case.

Finally, Trump took office. “We heard about people being deported for nothing … people who went to see a judge and got deported,” James says. “We were afraid.”

Removals overall have slowed under Trump, but for Haitians they jumped from 300 in the 2016 fiscal year to 5,500 in 2017. That’s largely due to the end of a stay on deportations and a surge in Haitian migrants entering through Mexico. Meanwhile, arrests of immigrants with no known criminal conviction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than doubled from 2016 to 2017. Behind those stats are countless stories of men and women who have lived in the United States for decades being taken from families, jobs, and communities, often at a regular check-in at an immigration office.

* * *

Comparisons between the United States and Canada are constant, especially among those who entered both countries illegally. One man describes surviving a harrowing boat trip from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico only to be shackled at the wrists and ankles by U.S. border patrol agents. Others talk about being thrown in cold cells at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Elsie is a nurse and a resident of Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, in plateau farm country north of Montréal. She has been living in Canada for 30 years, but occasionally returns to her Haitian homeland. “I’m proud to be Canadian and proud to be Haitian, too,” she says. And she stays tuned in to the experiences of Haitian migrants around the region.

She spent a Sunday afternoon in October 2017 like she spent most Sundays: cooking rice and beans for family members and venting about what she’d been hearing. “There was that little Haitian woman who went to the U.S. from Brazil,” she said, “and she had to pay $20,000 to get out of prison! It’s a business! If people don’t pay $15,000 to $20,000, they put them on a plane.” Elsie understands that people are not deported merely for failing to pay the required bond, but she also knows that asylum-seekers are much less likely to get asylum if they are stuck behind bars. “Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.”

In his first week in office, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the grounds for which immigrants can be detained, and limiting the use of parole for detained asylum-seekers. Over the first eight months of his presidency, according to a report by the nonprofit Human Rights First, parole rates for asylum-seekers appear to have plummeted, asylum-seekers are held for many months, and sometimes their release is contingent on payment of bonds as high as $15,000 to $20,000.

Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.

Elsie’s Sunday gatherings now feature a special guest — her younger brother Yves. In July, Yves walked across the border at Roxham Road, then skipped the shelter by staying with his sister. He says he fled Haiti for the United States after “jealous” people attacked his business in Port-au-Prince. But with Trump in office, he says, he had a bad feeling about his prospects there. “He was withdrawing everything, banning refugees, talking about eliminating TPS, getting rid of protections for immigrants who came as children … so I didn’t know if I could get asylum.”

Like Samuel and Darline, Yves says he had to leave a child back in Haiti, so he’s anxious to get papers to bring her here.

Within a few months, Yves had his own place and a job at a pig slaughterhouse, but in April, a judge rejected his asylum claim, saying he should have sought protection in the United States. Yves is appealing the decision and says, whatever the outcome, he’s still convinced he made the right decision in moving to Canada. “Even if some of us are not qualified [for asylum],” he says, “the welcome is completely different here.”

* * *

In my conversations with asylum-seekers last year, I kept bringing up the statistic I’d seen, that only about half of Haitian asylum-seekers with cases finalized in 2016 were granted asylum. (For 2017, the acceptance rate dropped to 22 percent.) The response was usually a recognition that they might not succeed but an insistence that they made the right choice in coming to Canada anyway.

As Matthew Turner, the Roxham Road resident, suggests, “that Ellis Island thing” is more evident in Canada than in the United States today. This is certainly true in public discourse. In October, Canada swore in a new Governor General, an important Canadian figurehead selected by the Prime Minister. Trudeau chose astronaut Julie Payette, who delivered an installation speech in a mix of French and English, dotted with phrases in Algonquin. The speech seemed a delineation of what distinguishes Canada from its southern neighbor today. She talked about the importance of trusting science, of internationalism, tolerance, and compassion, and among her last words were these: “We are the true north, strong and free, and we should always look after those who have less, stand up for those who can’t, reach out across differences, use our land intelligently, open our borders, and welcome those who seek harbor.”

When it came to Syrian refugees, in the past couple of years, Canada has served to inspire and shame Americans wishing to be a more welcoming country. Since November 2015, more than 54,000 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada, compared with fewer than 19,000 in the United States. Facebook video posts showed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeting families at the airport with winter coats and words of welcome. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of regular citizens stepped in to help. Private sponsors actually brought in and supported 43 percent of those refugees for a year.

It would be hard to draw comparisons between pre-approved Syrian refugees flying in and Haitians crossing the border and being arrested. For one, there is no private sponsorship system in place to care for the new arrivals from the States. However, many private organizations in and around Montréal are committed to helping them get settled and integrated.

Take Christ en Action church. It’s in an unmarked brick box-shaped building in a quiet neighborhood, but on Sunday mornings the drums draw you through the open door and into a vast space packed with parishioners in a full spectrum of garb, from form-fitting dresses to suits in black, white, and shiny pastel damask. Several turn to greet unfamiliar faces, offering greetings in French.

The churchgoers — largely Haitian and African — pride themselves on the warm welcome. At a service last September, Pastor Fofy Ndelo, who is Congolese, said a few words in Haitian Creole, then returned to French to give an update on which donations were now needed for “the refugees” — winter coats for adults and children, as well as furniture and bedding for those who’d found their own places to live.

About 15 so-called refugees sat in pews at the far end of the church, and after the service they filed into a back room for lunch. They found out about Christ en Action when members visited their shelters and brought them here on buses. While a number of them now lived in their own places, after their meal a volunteer would drive them all home. Later, another volunteer would pick them up to bring them back for dinner. These are services orchestrated by the church’s social action team, which, team member Shirley René told me, has 10 subgroups. “One group serves nonperishable food, a follow-up group sees what your needs are, another team gives clothes and bedding and furniture, another helps people find a place to live. … There’s a group that visits them in their homes,” and so on.

René, who is of Haitian descent and has been with the church for more than a decade, said about 50 new arrivals were regularly coming to the church, “because they love the way we welcome them.”

Many other Montréal churches also stepped up to help the new arrivals, especially in the heavily Haitian Saint-Michel neighborhood. So did Maison d’Haiti, a 46-year-old organization now housed in a modern, windowy, art-filled space that bustled last fall with Haitian men, women, and children, picking up and dropping off clothing and diapers, standing in line to get help with things like filling out asylum applications, or grabbing a Haitian meat pastry in the organization’s café.

A few blocks away, on Boulevard Crémazie, is CPAM, one of several Haitian radio stations here, and down the street is a towering, shining example of Haitian success in Montréal. Groupe 3737, named after its street number, inhabits some of the 12 floors in the curtain-glass-wall building, using them for start-up incubation and training. Frantz Saintellemy, Haitian-born and Saint-Michel–raised, founded the group with his wife, Vickie Joseph, with the intent of encouraging talented young people, mostly immigrants or children of immigrants — a reflection of the community — to invest in this long-depressed neighborhood.

Saintellemy wanted to help his community thrive by capitalizing on what is true in Canada as well as the United States: Immigrants are far more likely than the rest of the population to start businesses. And he sees particular promise in Haitian immigrants, who make up about a third of his group’s participants.

“If you’re from Haiti,” he says, “you were trading. It’s the number one business in Haiti. Trading is in their DNA, so a lot of them have an entrepreneurial mindset.” In Haiti, with so few formal jobs available, many people buy food or clothes in one part of the country — often on the Dominican border — to sell in another.

Saintellemy smiles as he speaks, sitting in a bright, spacious office behind a large desk cluttered only with some copies of Groupe 3737’s glossy bilingual magazine Black is Beautiful. He says in Montréal there are great prospects for new Haitian immigrants importing food and other goods from Haiti to sell to members of the diaspora here. There are also artists and artisans, and educated Haitians who spent years in the United States and are well-positioned to work as translators. What’s more, belying the image of asylum-seekers arriving on foot and staying in shelters, many actually have money to invest in a new business, Saintellemy says.

For those with tenuous status, he says, they’re particularly worth investing in for several reasons: For one, many employers are leery of hiring people without permanent status, and for another, creating a business could help them get asylum. “The quicker you can generate income [and] hire your own lawyer, your chances increase significantly,” he says, “and if you’re working and paying taxes, the harder it is for the government to tell you to leave.”

Saintellemy says that “without question” enthusiasm for starting a business is higher among people with tenuous status. He knows this because, in addition to doing clothing drives for new arrivals last summer, Groupe 3737 offered regular Business 101 classes for those living in immigrant shelters. Participants were taught about business laws and policies in Canada, specifically Québec, and given tips like how to advertise and bid on contracts online. Saintellemy says the courses drew up to 50 people.

Before founding Groupe 3737, Saintellemy spent years in the States, including studying electrical engineering at Northeastern University and taking a fellowship at MIT Sloan. I ask him about something James told me: that in Montréal, “the Haitians ahead of you help you,” but in the United States, not so much.

“Yeah,” Saintellemy says. “The Haitian community is very well organized here in Québec.” He says Haitians generally thrive more here. “I think it’s easier because of the French. Language isn’t as much of a barrier,” he says. “Second of all, the Haitian community is more financially secure here than in Boston or even New York or Miami … if you look at the percentage of Haitians doing well. … So it’s easier for them to help others when they’re doing well.”

James told me…that in Montréal, ‘the Haitians ahead of you help you,’ but in the United States, not so much.

Of course, many Haitians in Canada live in poverty and obscurity. But there are also plenty of Haitian luminaries in Canadian sport, arts, and politics — including several Olympic athletes; the novelist Dany Laferrière, inducted into the prestigious Académie Française; parliamentarian Emmanuel Dubourg; former Governor General Michaëlle Jean; and the deputy premier of Québec, Dominique Anglade.

* * *

Migration across the border into Canada has fallen considerably since last summer, and Haitians now make up a small portion of that population, down from more than 80 percent. By last fall, Nigerians were overtaking Haitians in number, with shelter residents talking of horrors in Biafra.

Jean Nicolas Beuze, of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, says the overall decline in numbers might be due to falling temperatures and the start of school (the summer’s migrants included hundreds of children), and he believes the particularly precipitous decline in the number of Haitians coming across is likely because messages were sent through consulates and visiting politicians to correct misperceptions about the ease of getting asylum in Canada.

However, with the Trump administration’s announcement on November 20 that TPS for Haitians will end in July 2019, officials in Canada prepared for more Haitian asylum-seekers, with 27 winterized trailers — able to accommodate 200 people — set up at the border. The TPS decision affects at least 50,000 Haitian-born people who’ve been in the United States for more than eight years, and their American-born children, estimated at some 27,000.

Canada’s own version of TPS for Haitians expired in 2014, but most of its recipients were not made to leave the country. The estimated 3,200 undocumented Haitians living in Canada at the time were given almost two more years to apply for permanent residency without threat of removal, and most have been able to get permanent residency through “H&C,” or humanitarian and compassionate grounds, which takes into consideration the ties one has forged to Canada while living here.

Still, coming to Canada does not make Haitian border crossers safe from deportation. Canada deported several hundred Haitians last year — a dramatic increase over 2016, and 120 just in the first seven months of this year.

James is well aware that deportation from Canada is possible, and it’s a terrible thought. “If I’m deported, it’s like the end of the world,” he says with a nervous shriek of a laugh. “Haiti has no work. And when you are overseas, you have like 20 people depending on you, who are waiting for your help. Imagine, if they deport me to Haiti, you’ll see how many people will suffer.” He says his brothers, sisters and some friends rely on him for school and other expenses.

James doesn’t wallow in the fear of deportation though. “We have to await a response, we have to pray, and we have to accept the response, whatever it is,” he says. “But for now we have to recognize how well Canada has received us.”

Haitians who left the United States to seek asylum in Canada essentially left one uncertainty for another. And yet, for now, there is a sense that they can breathe easy because there is reason and justice in the system, that the rules will be followed, and that meanwhile the tools are there for asylum-seekers to make a life for themselves while they wait.

For Samuel, the only problem with being in Canada is that his two older children aren’t with him. “That makes me feel really, really bad,” he says, “because I grew up without my father, and I don’t want the same for my children.” He talks to them on WhatsApp every day, but, he says, “It hurts to hear them say, ‘Papi, when are you coming back? Papi, come get us!’”

A year after coming here, Samuel still has no idea when he’ll go before an immigration judge. It’s clearly wearing on him. His life is better here in many ways, but even with both of them working — him during the day and Darline as a night caretaker for handicapped adults, the cost of living is harder to manage here. Meanwhile, their two older children are growing up in another country, and there’s no knowing when and where they will reunite.

Now, when I ask him if he regrets moving to Canada, he hesitates, but then gives a firm no. “It’s a choice we made, without knowing how things would go.”

*The names of all asylum-seekers in this article have been changed to protect their identities.

***

Amy Bracken is an independent reporter and radio producer. She covers migration, economic development, religion, and human rights. She’s based in Boston, but in recent years she’s reported from Europe and across the Americas, especially Haiti. Her stories have been aired and published by PRI’s The World, Latino USA, USA Today, and Al Jazeera America, among others. She’s a graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she wrote her thesis on the detention of asylum-seekers.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Matt Giles

Eight Things You Need to Know About Me and the Beach

Matthew Brodeur / Unsplash

May-lee Chai | Longreads | July 2018 | 15 minutes (4,118 words)

When I was a junior in college, my father, mother, and brother took a trip to Hawaii. I didn’t go because I’d been named editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and needed to be at school before the semester started. I needed to get the first issue out for freshmen orientation. I also needed the money. My parents weren’t paying for my college, and I needed every little bit of cash that I could get.

While she was in Hawaii, my mother called me at my dorm to tell me about the trip. Only recently had my mother overcome her severe fear of flying and she still had a kind of ecstatic quality to her voice that I associated with the extreme highs that followed her moments of panic or fear.

“It’s beautiful! This is my place,” she declared. “The flowers, all the flowers, everywhere!”

She then proceeded to tell me how lovely she found Honolulu — the sunlight, the birds of paradise and jasmine and red ginger and hibiscus and bougainvillea, the white sand, the warm ocean. After seven years in the Midwest, seven years of blizzards and tornadoes followed by more blizzards and more tornadoes, she was sick of weather that rotated from one extreme of discomfort to the other.

“And they like me here! I went out into the water, Papa was on the beach, you know he won’t get wet, and Jeff wasn’t feeling well, he was in the room, so I went by myself into the ocean, and I was just splashing the water over my arms, it felt so good, and a white woman came up to me. She said, ‘Aloha! Welcome!’ Then she leaned in close to me and said, ‘We whites have to stick together against the Asian invasion.’” My mother was ecstatic. “She liked me! They like me here!” Read more…

What Ever Happened To the Truth?

Corbis Historical / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | July 2018 | 7 minutes (1,841)

It isn’t often that a book review makes headlines, but legendary New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani did just that in 2016. Published about six weeks before the presidential election — one day after the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, when it seemed Clinton’s win was inevitable — Kakutani’s review of Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich went viral when it was perceived as an attack on then-candidate Trump. The review itself was dominated by bullet-points drawing out ways in which Adolf Hitler went from a “‘Munich rabble-rouser’ — regarded by many as a self-obsessed ‘clown’ with a strangely ‘scattershot, impulsive style’” to Fuhrer in a country regarded as one of the poles of civilization. Trump’s name was nowhere in the review, but publications jumped on the apparent comparison. “Trump-Hitler comparison seen in New York Times book review,” said CNN; “This New York Times ‘Hitler’ book review sure reads like a thinly veiled Trump comparison,” from the Washington Post; “A review of a new Hitler biography is not so subtly all about Trump,” according to Vox. Even later reviews of the book itself were shaded by Kakutani’s seeming comparison.

Almost two years later, a subtle comparison between Hitler and now-President Trump feels incredibly tame and undeserving of such heavy scrutiny. But at the time, such comparisons weren’t altogether common in the mainstream; Trump seemed destined to lose and fade into whatever post-campaign activity he chose to channel his not-insignificant celebrity towards. Instead, of course, he won, and comparisons like Kakutani’s became far more common as it became clear that the presidency would not temper his stated goals and ambitions.

The review would prove to be one of Kakutani’s last in her position as the New York Times Book Critic, a role in which she proved a formidable force within the literary world. It was announced in July, 2017 that she would be stepping down after three and a half decades. Famously distant from the public eye, Kakutani’s seemingly abrupt departure so soon after causing a media firestorm left many questioning her next moves. Now, one year later, we have an answer: The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Read more…

The Far Right’s Fight Against Race-Conscious School Admissions

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 10: Attorney Bert Rein (L), speaks to the media while standing with plaintiff Abigail Noel Fisher (R), after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in her caseon October 10, 2012 in Washington, DC. The high court heard oral arguments on Fisher V. University of Texas at Austin and are tasked with ruling on whether the university's consideration of race in admissions is constitutional. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Late in the afternoon on July 3, the Department of Justice announced it was rescinding 24 documents issued by the Obama administration between 2011 and 2016. The documents  offered guidance to a range of constituencies, including homeowners, law enforcement, and employers. Some detailed employment protections for refugees and asylees; seven of the 24 discussed policies and Supreme Court rulings on race-conscious admissions practices in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. In its statement, the DOJ called the guides “unnecessary, outdated, inconsistent with existing law, or otherwise improper.”

No immediate policy change will come from the documents’ removal. It’s more of a signal, a gesture in a direction, a statement about ideology. The Trump administration has already enacted several hard-line positions on immigration. And the Sessions-backed Justice Department has made a habit of signaling, by way of gesture, its opposition to affirmative action, and its belief that race-conscious policies, specifically, often amount to acts of discrimination.

***

The term “affirmative action” is ambiguous and has never been strictly defined. It’s a collection of notions, gestures, and ideas that existed before its present-day association with race. According to Smithsonian, the term was likely first used in the Depression-era Wagner Act. This legislation aimed to end harmful labor practices and encourage collective bargaining. It also mandated that employers found in violation “take affirmative action including reinstatement of employees with or without backpay” to prevent the continuation of harmful practices. The reinstatement and payment of dismissed employees were affirmative gestures that could be taken to right a wrong.

Nearly a decade later, in 1941, under pressure from organizer A. Philip Randolph, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 to prohibit race-based discrimination in the defense industries during the buildup to WWII. It is considered the first federal action to oppose racial discrimination since Reconstruction, and paved the way for President John F. Kennedy, who was the first to use “affirmative action” in association with race in Executive Order 10925. Kennedy’s order instructed government contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed,” regardless of “race, creed, color, or national origin.” President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the scope of Kennedy’s order to add religion when he issued Executive Order 11246 in 1965. Two years later, Johnson amended his own document to include sex on the list of protected attributes.

It was Republican president Richard Nixon who expanded the use of affirmative actions to ensure equal employment in all facets of government in 1969, when he issued Executive Order 11478. Nixon ran for office in 1968 on “law and order” and “tough on crime” messaging. He believed what he called “black capitalism” –- the idea of thriving black communities with high rates of employment and entrepreneurship — would ease the agitations of civil rights groups and end urban unrest. At the time, Nixon’s rhetoric won the support of a smattering of black cultural figures such as James Brown. “Black capitalism” was little more than a co-optation of some of the tenets of Black Power, which itself had come from a long-established line of conservative black political thought that emphasized economic empowerment and independence, self-determination and personal responsibility. In his version, Nixon envisioned only a slight role for the federal government; without the push of significant government investment, the policies and programs he created didn’t result in sweeping change. Still, shadows of Nixon’s thinking on black economics endured: They’re present in multiple speeches Obama made to black audiences during his presidency; Jay Z’s raps about the transformative, generational effects of his wealth; Kanye West’s TMZ and Twitter rants. Also, the backlash Nixon faced is remarkably similar in tone and content to today’s challenges to affirmative action, which typically involve a white person’s complaints about the incremental gains made by members of a previously disadvantaged group:

In 1969 Section 8(a) of the Small Business Act authorized the SBA to manage a program to coordinate government agencies in allocating a certain number of contracts to minority small businesses—referred to as procurements or contract “set-asides.” Daniel Moynihan, author of the controversial Moynihan Report, helped shape the program. By 1971 the SBA had allocated $66 million in federal contracts to minority firms, making it the most robust federal aid to minority businesses. Still, the total contracts given to minority firms amounted to only .1 percent of the $76 billion in total federal government contracts that year.

Yet even these miniscule minority set-asides immediately faced backlash from blue-collar workers, white construction firms, and conservatives, who called them “preferential treatment” for minorities. Ironically, multiple studies revealed that 20 percent of these already meager set-asides ended up going to white-owned firms.

***

A sense of lost advantage and power seems to animate both historical and recent challenges to race-based policies and practices. In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978) the first affirmative action case the Supreme Court ruled on, Allan Bakke, a white University of California at Davis medical school applicant, sued the school after being twice denied admission. The school had created a system to set aside a certain number of spaces for students from marginalized groups. The Court decided practices that relied on quota systems were unconstitutional, but it upheld the use of race in admissions decisions as long as it was among a host of other factors. Rulings in subsequent cases, such as Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and most recently, Fisher v. University of Texas (2016) supported the use of race in admissions and reiterated the federal government’s interest in the diversity of the nation’s institutions. In the most-recent case, now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy provided the Court’s swing vote.

Plaintiffs in affirmative action challenges tend to argue race-conscious admissions policies violate rights granted by the Fourteenth Amendment, especially its clause guaranteeing “equal protection of the laws.” Ratified 150 years ago last week, the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship and defined citizenship’s parameters. Its ideas originated in the years leading up to Reconstruction, during “colored conventions” held among African American leaders and activists,  and form the underpinnings of Brown v. Board Education (1954) and some provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

One of the most prominent opponents of affirmative action, Edward Blum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, actively seeks and recruits aggrieved plaintiffs and attorneys to challenge race-based policies in school admissions and voting practices. Blum was the force behind the complaint of Abagail Fisher, the white student at the center of Fisher v. University of Texas. According to the New York Times:

In the Texas affirmative action case, he told a friend that he was looking for a white applicant to the University of Texas at Austin, his own alma mater, to challenge its admissions criteria. The friend passed the word to his daughter, Abigail Fisher. About six months later, the university rejected Ms. Fisher’s application.

“I immediately said, ‘Hey, can we call Edward?’” she recalled in an interview.

The case went to the Supreme Court twice, and though Ms. Fisher was portrayed as a less than stellar student, vilified as supporting a racist agenda, and ultimately lost, she said she still believed in Mr. Blum. “I think we started a conversation,” she said. “Edward obviously is not going to just lie down and play dead.”

Blum’s first lawsuit came about after he lost a Congressional election in Houston because, he felt, the boundaries of his district were drawn solely along racial lines. He is now behind lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which allege the schools’ admissions policies discriminate against Asian American applicants. It is interesting and bold to use white women and Asian American students to dismantle programs meant to address America’s legacy of discrimination. Both groups have benefited significantly from Reconstruction and Civil Rights-era policies and legislation. Do Blum, Sessions, and their supporters believe race-based policies are irrelevant, illegal, or improper because for many, they’ve worked? I sense something more nefarious at play, such as a mounting sense of loss and growing resentment that the demographic shifts in our country also mean inevitable shifts in who holds power.

The Sessions-helmed Justice Department’s signals and the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the high court, have, I’m sure, heartened activists like Blum. For the Nation, Eric Foner wrote about how the Fourteenth amendment’s ambiguity is what allows it to be used in a way that is so at odds with the spirit of its origins. It is that ambiguity, he says, that will allow, someday, in a different political climate, for another era of correction.

Sources and further reading:

My Brother Comes to Moscow

Getty / Penguin Random House

Keith Gessen | A Terrible Country | July 2018 | 21 minutes (5,369 words)

 

All happy families are alike; ours, obviously, was not a happy family.

What had we done wrong? By most measures, you would have thought we’d done everything right. For a few years in the late 1970s, the Soviets allowed the emigration of their Jews. First they sent the criminals and critics (“Let them rob and criticize the Americans!”), but there were only so many criminals and critics, and they eventually started letting out computer programmers like my father and literary scholars like my mother. My parents weren’t stupid. When you are given a chance to emigrate from a poor, decrepit, crumbling country to a wealthy, powerful, dynamic one, you take it. They took it. They filed their application, bribed someone who said they’d help, sold all their stuff — and off we went.

It wasn’t easy. I was six years old when we came over, and even I could tell. We stayed with another family at first, then in a weird apartment in Brighton, at the very edge of respectable Boston. Someone stole our security deposit. With my father’s first substantial paycheck we bought a giant, ugly car. As my parents drove around Brighton visiting their Russian friends — all their friends were Russian — I sprawled on the backseat and slept.

Eventually they figured it out, my father went from good job to better, and my mother became one of the few literary Russians to actually find a literary job. We moved from Brighton to Brookline to aristocratic Newton. But through it all Dima expressed the frustrations and limitations of our new life. He denounced the Russians my parents hung out with as losers; he dismissed his new classmates as idiots. He had hated the Soviet Union, he said, but at least in the Soviet Union there were people you could talk to.

The only person he seemed to like was me. As he started making money in his first jobs in America — he got a job as a gas station attendant, which included, he told me proudly, both a wage and some tips — he always bought me little gifts and let me in on his theories about capitalism. He sought to enlist me in his ongoing battle with our parents, and let me in on all the (limited) family dirt.

As Dima moved out into the world — he left home the minute he turned eighteen, declared to my flabbergasted parents that he wasn’t going to college, and incorporated his first company before the year was out (they made some kind of video game) — I watched him with profound fascination. What was this new world and what could a Kaplan hope to do in it? How could you live? I had no idea. My parents were good people but they lived in a Russian ghetto. It wasn’t just their friends who were Russian, it was everyone: our doctor was Russian, our dentist was Russian, our car mechanic was Russian, the clown who came to our house for birthday parties was Russian, the guy who fixed the roof was Russian. How the fuck did they know so many Russian people? The thing is, I knew this world, this close-​­knit community, would not be available to me. It was as if, yes, my parents had emigrated, but only to the Russia that existed inside America; Dima and I would have to emigrate all over again into America itself. Dima was the one who went out into the world and figured it out. He was the advance party for the two of us. I did not have to do what he did — in fact in most ways I would do the exact opposite — but from him at least I could learn the possibilities. Until I was about sixteen there was no one I admired more.
Read more…

Gone Gray

Pierre-Joseph Redouté via Rawpixel / CC, Andreas Kuehn via Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Berger Gross | Longreads | July 2018 | 21 minutes (5,335 words)

 

We’re in London, somewhere between the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus. It’s Thanksgiving week, and my then 9-year-old and I have been winding our way through the late November afternoon on a marathon walking tour of the city. But now we’re lost. I stop a woman who looks to be in her mid-40s, about my age, to ask for directions, and I quickly realize that she’s one of them: attractive, fashionable in an appealingly unconventional way — and with completely, unabashedly gray hair. Forget the directions. I peel off my hat to show her what’s doing underneath, where I have three months’ worth of roots. “Brilliant. Keep going,” she says. “You won’t regret it.”

For years, and more and more in the past year or two, I’d see them on the street — the striking silver hair on an artist type in her 40s on the sidewalk in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side; the shock of a long gray braid down the back of a fiftysomething woman at a thermal spa in Iceland; the short, gray bangs and bob on my sixtysomething neighbors at the farmers market in rural Maine. The surprising beauty of a woman in her 30s with unexpected, natural gray. Not to mention all the millennials — and Kim Kardashian — dying their hair bottle gray.

Throughout my 30s I’d been a vigilant hair colorer, doing whatever it took to remedy and right the gray roots growing out from my middle part. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when coloring my hair went from an occasional, even enjoyable, splurge — an optional luxury — to a required part of regular beauty maintenance and of my looking professional and pretty. But as I entered my 40s, I found my feminist and aesthetic selves at war each month when I sat in the salon chair.

Then the world changed. The New York Times needle impossibly tipped the wrong way: Trump was elected. During that bleak late autumn and winter, after the fall foliage–filled weekends of knocking on doors for Hillary, I cried myself to sleep and woke up to the steady drum of anger and disbelief. Then, almost a year later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and I spent my evenings half ignoring laundry and bath time and bedtime, so that I could keep up with the #MeToo news cycle. Twitter went from a procrastination time suck to a daily engagement in feminist dialogue, with a fervor the likes of which I hadn’t felt since Women Studies 101. We’d entered a time of resistance against our abuser and pussy-grabber in chief and his cronies, and like so many women, I’d absolutely had it with the constraints of patriarchy.

Now more than ever, I resented — even hated — the dye. Having to dye my hair was one more patriarchal rule I didn’t have time or patience for. And Trump’s ridiculous orange dye job made me see the deceptive element in hair color and want to run even farther from the bottle. It’s not just that I didn’t want to keep up with the hassle and expense of coloring my roots a dark brown every four weeks and highlighting the rest of my hair every few months. I wanted to become the kind of woman who could give myself permission to go gray, who’d embrace authenticity and realness, and stop running from the reality of aging and mortality. But could I do it?

Read more…

Nurses, Unite!

Getty, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Livia Gershon | Longreads | June 2018 | 9 minutes (2,201 words)

Kate Phillips, a nurse who works in the intensive care unit at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, is part of a group trying to form a union. “Every nurse here has talked about times where he or she felt unsafe because there was not enough staffing, not enough equipment, or medicines came late because there were not enough pharmacy techs,” she told The Sun. The administration, she went on, “can basically make all the decisions and they don’t look at things from the perspective of patient care like we do.” This past January in Virginia, Patty Nelson, a psychiatric nurse who is the chapter chair of her local union, called on the state’s general assembly to expand Medicaid as soon as possible, citing clients with mental illness and addiction who can’t get the treatment they need. And the California Nurses Association (CNA), the largest union of nurses in that state, has emerged as a champion of a single-payer health care system, fighting their way to their capitol. “We understand that these legislators are not going to do this on their own,” Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and executive director of the union, told California Healthline, a health care news site. “It’s going to take a movement of their constituents, nurses and other health care professionals. Legislators are going to need an intense amount of pressure, and that’s what we’re doing: We’re knocking on every door, we’re meeting and organizing.”

Nursing work, like most other health care jobs, is growing fast: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add 438,100 jobs in registered nursing by 2026. Their strength in numbers has also brought organizing power: while most of the labor movement has declined in the face of pressure from unfavorable laws and moneyed opposition, in the past decade, nurses’ unionization rates have been gaining momentum, with tens of thousands more members.

Read more…

A Woman’s Work: Home Economics* (*I Took Woodworking Instead)

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,600 words)

By the time I was 44 I’d never lived with a boyfriend, a fact that I, a woman living under a patriarchy and not getting any younger, sometimes thought should be bothering me more, but which didn’t.

I even had fond memories of a day when I was 41 and freshly dumped, on which I woke up alone in bed, stretched out, and had a remarkable, quite unexpected realization…

Read more…

The Power in Knowing: Black Women, HIV, and the Realities of Safe Sex

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,763 words)

 

In December, when a creative agency asked me to participate in a regional Volunteers of America public service announcement encouraging my fellow community members to “know your status,” I said yes. A hesitant yes, but a yes. At least once a year, I make it a point to enlighten myself by asking my gynecologist for a full screening for sexually transmitted infections, including an HIV test. But I’m more of a safe sex bronze medalist than an all-star. My 17-year track record of requiring men to wear condoms during intercourse is only nearly flawless, my trysts with unsafe sex more recent than I’d like to admit.

A retrospective on my vagina’s contact with bare penis: When I lost my virginity — It was over and done with before I could utter any questions about using protection. There was time the condom slipped off — it happens. Or at least it did that one time. In an encounter with that same man, who I’d casually been sleeping with for a long stretch, he sweet-talked me into letting him take the condom off mid-act. I want to feel you, he’d said — I’d felt terrible afterward. I knew better than to trust these hoes with my sexual health. There was the spontaneous Halloween makeup sex in the back of a minivan with a guy I was kinda in a relationship with. Immediately after, he accused me of trying to get knocked up because I’d always been so vigilant about condom use, nevermind that a jobless, carless rapper living with his brother’s girlfriend’s parents isn’t my ideal baby daddy material. There was the man I was seeing who made a fuss about it every single time, whining he couldn’t come with one on, so half-asleep, I finally just let it happen sans condom. Shortly after, I learned he’d been cheating on me. And, I assume, he’d been doing the same sort of whining in the other woman’s bed, being sexually reckless with us both.

And, more recently, when after a 12-hour stretch of drinking, I fell into bed with a man and nodded when he asked if it was OK, even though I knew I wasn’t OK with going without a condom. Every time we hooked up after that first time, I felt weird about insisting he wear one, so I didn’t ask him to. Even though changing your mind is totally allowed and asking can be so simple and I’m sure he would have complied, it just felt complicated in ways that feel dumb now. This lapse in judgement happened to overlap with my period deciding to be six weeks late and my new gyno calling to tell me my IUD might have shifted and might not be effective. After two intravaginal ultrasounds (and a negative pregnancy test) it was determined that, LOL, my IUD was actually where it was supposed to be all along.

I worried that doing the PSA would make me a hypocrite. Who was I to encourage others to engage in safe sex when there were times I hadn’t? I reasoned with myself that I’d read enough inspirational quotes on Instagram to know my humanity wasn’t a byproduct of my perfection but rather of my mistakes. So I decided to do the shoot anyway, because I was someone who knew what it was like to be so distracted worrying about the possible long-term consequences of my split-second decision not to require a condom that I couldn’t even enjoy the act itself. I was someone who’d felt bashful about asking to be tested because heaven forbid the medical professional I pay to look after my reproductive health, and who I was required to see once a year to re-up on my birth control pill prescription, know that I, an adult woman, was having sex outside of a monogamous marriage for purposes other than conceiving a child. I was someone who was tired of always being the enforcer in the bedroom. It made me feel like a finger-wagging mom-type: “Eat your Wheaties, do your homework, wrap it up!”

Read more…

How to Ruin the Scripps Spelling Bee in Four Letters: E-S-P-N

Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, New York, participates in the finals of the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee May 30, 2013 at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Mahankali has won the championship of the annual spelling contest after he correctly spelled the word "knaidel." (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Back in 2013, for Deadspin, Drew Magary attended the annual Scripps Spelling Bee, in which 11 million kids spell off across America in a bid to become the brainy few who land onstage for the final round, and learns how such a simple contest had been sullied (S-U-L-L-I-E-D, SULLIED) by the need to keep the event exciting for ESPN’s television audience.

• The atmosphere at the bee is very supportive. I went around looking for nutbar stage parents, but most of the parents were either A) pleasant or B) too media savvy to act like insane people in front of a reporter. These parents weren’t talking to the media for the first time. The finalists who got knocked out late were all given standing ovations (genuine ones). The kids all high-fived one another when they got words right. Whatever cutthroat elements of the competition existed only existed under the surface, or behind closed doors. With one glaring exception …

• I can’t begin to tell you how fucked-up ESPN has made this event. In addition to changing the very rules of competition, ESPN made these poor kids tape canned segment after canned segment. Some of these kids were natural extroverts, but not all of them were. I can only imagine how awkward it is for a shy 12-year-old to have to dance around in sunglasses for an ESPN producer and then watch that canned footage up on the big screen with everyone in the house watching it. There were so many canned segments in the beginning—including a sketch in which Dr. Bailly re-enacts those AT&T ads with the dude in a classroom asking kids easy questions; a shitty Tom Rinaldi piece that reminded you that “every word is the World Series”; a montage of ESPN’s 20 years covering the bee; and a moment in which a kid tells the audience the new format is a “win-win for the Bee”—that it took a full 42 minutes to get through the first round of the finals. Without all that shit, it probably would have taken six minutes. But in their quest to Olympify the competition, ESPN added shitloads of filler. This is why a computer knocks you out now, to fit in a segment in which Sam Ponder asks people around Washington to spell the president’s name right. (Ponder noted that only one person she talked to spelled Obama’s name correctly. He was from Japan.)

• And ESPN’s opening sequence to the bee was REALLY fucked up. It had a harsh female voiceover saying, “IN LIFE THERE ARE WINNERS AND THERE ARE LOSERS. YOU CAN EITHER SPELL THE WORD OR YOU CAN’T. IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT THE WORD IS YOUR FRIEND BUT THIS IS A LIE. THE WORD IS HERE TO DEFEAT YOU.” Way to ease the pressure on these kids, ESPN. Assholes. What is wrong with you people?

At the end, the last kid standing was bee veteran Arvind Mahankali, who finally won the thing on “KNAIDEL” (though it was his spelling of “DEHNSTUFE” in an earlier round that really brought the house down). When Arvind was declared the winner, two confetti cannons went off on either side of him and showered him for what seemed like 90 minutes. Arvind barely blinked the whole time, either due to shock (again, they’re still just kids) or because he probably would rather have walked off stage to be with his family than stand there and get blasted with 800 hundred pounds of shredded paper.

Read the story