Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

The results of the “audit” — a haphazard GOP review of ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County, with no legal force behind it — found the vote totals virtually unchanged from the actual election results, which were certified by Arizona officials in November of last year.

That outcome isn’t a surprise: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which US elections officials said last year was “the most secure in American history.” Every recount requested by Trump and his supporters has upheld the results of the 2020 election.

While the ballot review didn’t turn up Trump’s nonexistent election fraud, the process has caused a legion of problems for Arizona elections officials, who are currently facing death threats and will now have to spend millions to replace voting machines in Maricopa County.

It also hasn’t quieted some of the most aggressive proponents of voter fraud conspiracies in Arizona, including state Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, who is now calling for a “full signature audit” in Maricopa County, and Trump himself, who used a Saturday interview with right-wing outlet One America News to push debunked claims of election fraud.

And, perhaps most worryingly, Arizona’s attempt at a recount has provided a clear roadmap for pro-Trump officials around the country — specifically, in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — to pursue their own “audits” and sow further distrust in American elections.

The Arizona recount was never credible

On the surface, the Arizona audit’s findings this week approximated Maricopa County’s actual, certified 2020 election results. The vote totals in the final report only differed by a few hundred votes out of about 2.1 million, with Biden actually picking up votes.

The Arizona “audit” coming out tomorrow didn’t just confirm Biden won. Biden actually gained votes in their recount, while Trump lost hundreds, according to a draft report. https://t.co/vSflCtllni pic.twitter.com/9JuLNtYbeW

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) September 24, 2021

In the final report released Friday, however, Cyber Ninjas never explicitly say that Biden won, and the report also continues to baselessly raise the possibility of election fraud.

That, combined with the process behind the audit — partisan, slipshod, and conspiratorial — makes for a deeply concerning precedent, particularly as other states take up similar efforts.

From the start, the recount was a partisan enterprise, supported by Arizona’s Republican Senate majority. The company hired to conduct the audit — Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based security firm — had no experience conducting an election audit, and its CEO, Doug Logan, openly promoted pro-Trump election conspiracies on Twitter before deleting his account in January, according to the New York Times.

Cyber Ninjas also hired a group called Wake TSI to complete the hand count of Maricopa County ballots, adding to the chaos of the process. According to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, Wake TSI has ties to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement and had previously been contracted by pro-Trump group Defending the Republic to review the results of the election in one Pennsylvania county.

Cyber Ninja’s methods were also wildly out of line with normal audit procedures, which prioritize the security of ballots and voters’ personal information, and the group performed its review without the transparency typical for such processes, insisting to reporters and other observers that their procedures were “trade secrets.”

As Vox’s Ian Millhiser reported in May, Cyber Ninjas also pursued a long list of nonsense audit methods, including examining ballots under ultraviolet light and considering their “thickness or feel.”

Specifically, according to Millhiser:

After a state court ordered Cyber Ninjas to disclose how it is conducting this so-called audit, a subcontractor revealed that the process involves weighing ballots, examining them under a microscope, and examining the “thickness or feel” of individual ballots in order to identify “questionable ballots” that need to be examined by a “lead forensic examiner” and then “removed from the batch and sent for further analysis.”

On Friday, after the conclusion of the audit, a tweet from Maricopa County officials summed up the Cyber Ninjas effort.

“Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the official Maricopa County Twitter account noted. “Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.”

Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) September 24, 2021

Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin are following the Arizona model

Although the Arizona audit didn’t produce the result Trump wanted — an impossible about-face from the certified results that would give him further pretense to call into question the entire 2020 election — the effort is already serving as a model for Republicans looking to promulgate election fraud conspiracies.

Specifically, as of this week, Republican legislators in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin have all embarked on a mission to implement recounts or investigations of their own, though the election is long over and certified.

On Thursday, the Texas secretary of state’s office released a statement that it would perform a review of the election results in four counties — Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin — adding that they expect the Texas legislature to pay for the process, but failing to disclose any further details, or a reason why the audit is necessary. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump called on Gov. Greg Abbott to conduct an audit earlier on Thursday, despite the fact that Trump won the state by a sizable margin in 2020.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Republican legislators in the Senate’s Intergovernmental Operations Committee voted earlier this month to subpoena voters’ personal information — including addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial social security numbers — in preparation for a new review of the state’s 2020 election results.

Previous election audits, judicial determinations, and both Republican and Democratic election officials have already concluded that Biden won Pennsylvania, according to NPR.

Lastly, in Wisconsin, two separate election reviews — one by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, and one by a pro-Trump former state Supreme Court justice who has espoused false election conspiracies — are also underway.

Previously, the Trump campaign paid about $3 million for a review of the votes in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee and Dane counties, fraudulently alleging that “15-20% of absentee ballots in Milwaukee County were tainted” by poll workers. That recount, which was completed in November 2020, found no evidence of Trump’s claims and confirmed Biden’s victory in the state.

In addition to these new audits, it’s possible that pro-Trump recount efforts in Arizona aren’t over yet either: On Friday, Trump-backed Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem tweeted out a call to conduct a recount in Arizona’s Pima County.

Arizona’s “audit” is bad news for US democracy

On the surface, the Arizona audit didn’t work out for Trump or the Arizona GOP — that is, it didn’t find the election fraud they’ve long alleged exists, contrary to all evidence. On another level, however, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out Friday, Trump and company got exactly what they wanted.

“The Cyber Ninjas appear to have done exactly what they were hired to do,” Bump wrote ahead of the release of the final report. “They were not hired to recount ballots that had already been counted. They were, instead, hired to slather some semblance of authority on top of conspiracy theories. To anchor irrational assumptions about fraud to something resembling rationality.”

The problems with that are obvious — despite the complete lack of evidence, claims of voter fraud have taken root with a broad portion of the Republican electorate, election workers are facing a barrage of death threats and harassment, and a CNN/SSRS poll conducted earlier this month found that a majority of Americans now feel that American democracy is “under attack.”

The prospect of more recounts to come in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas also means that that problem isn’t likely to abate any time soon — and as the immediate calls for more “audits” by pro-Trump officials in Arizona underscore, the goal isn’t so much to confirm the accuracy of the 2020 election as to confirm a preconceived, false belief that the election was stolen from Trump.

“Though many may experience a short burst of schadenfreude at the Republicans’ failure here, the result isn’t really funny,” the Atlantic’s David A. Graham wrote on Friday. “All is not well that ends well. Faith in elections is essential to a functioning democracy, and Trump and his allies have sought to undercut the belief that the election system is accurate.”

Crawford worked in tech when he started Roots of Progress, and launched it as a nonprofit and full-time project only recently. I sat down with Crawford to talk about what progress is, what the progress studies movement brings to the table, and what he thinks is missing from our national conversation about inventions, discoveries, and the societies that succeed at encouraging them.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Kelsey Piper

What is progress to you?

Jason Crawford

Progress is anything that helps human beings live better lives: longer, happier, healthier, in mind, body, and spirit. And more choices about how we want to live our lives: our careers; where we live; if, when, and who we marry; whether to have kids or not. Fundamentally, I judge progress by humanistic standards.

Now, sometimes in the progress community, especially when we talk about it, we’re using it as a shorthand for a narrower concept of progress, which is more material progress, progress especially in technology and industry and the economy. And that is, I would say, the most obvious form of progress, the most tangible and the easiest to prove and point to and measure. But we should always remember that it’s not the only form, nor is that the ultimate form.

Kelsey Piper

That actually was one of my big questions for you. You do mostly focus on material progress. Why is that? Is that a particularly big or just a particularly measurable component of progress?

Jason Crawford

It’s most tangible and clear. In 1800, the average person on the planet was living on the equivalent of about $3 a day, translated into modern dollars and purchasing power. Living standards for most of the world have risen significantly over those hundreds of years.

This rise in living standards, especially for such a broad part of the population, is absolutely unprecedented in history. It is one of the biggest and most important facts in all of human history.

And I think if you care about the well-being of humanity, you have to look at that fact, and you have to be really interested in it.

Kelsey Piper

So what makes progress studies different from, like, history? Obviously, you study many of the same questions historians study.

Jason Crawford

The existing discipline that it’s closest to is probably economic history. Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term progress studies in an article that ran in the Atlantic about two years ago. They conceived of it as an interdisciplinary field that would cut across economics, history, economic history, the history and philosophy of science, the psychology of industrial organization, and so forth.

Their call was for something that was interdisciplinary across those fields that would be more prescriptive and a little less focused on [being] purely descriptive. A lot of those fields tell us how the world is. And [Cowen and Collison] were calling for something that would tell us a little bit more: “Well, what should we do?”

My take is that progress studies is not a separate field or academic discipline, exactly. It’s more of a set of basic premises and values that condition how anybody would go about pursuing any of those fields.

Premises such as progress is real and important, but it is not automatic or inevitable. It is something that comes about in significant part because of human agency — because we choose to pursue it. All of this leads you fundamentally to the idea that we should study the causes of progress in order to preserve them, protect them, and enhance them, so we can make more progress for everybody.

One of the most prominent economists who’s talked about progress in recent years, Robert Gordon, wrote The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which is a really excellent study of the last 150 years or so of US economic history and technological and industrial progress. At the end of that book, he essentially concludes that the very high rates of progress that we saw over that period were, frankly, a fluke.

And so I think progress studies would approach the same set of facts with a different set of starting premises or assumptions. We might say that, no, actually there’s something here that is not entirely a fluke, that is at least somewhat within human control. And we can keep this trend going if we figure out how.

Kelsey Piper

Gordon’s conclusion — that there were high rates of progress in the past but that’s over now — might surprise people, but that’s actually a stance a number of people have argued, right?

Jason Crawford

This is sometimes referred to as technological stagnation or the stagnation hypothesis. And it’s been put forth in different ways by different people.

Peter Thiel was talking about it at least a decade ago. Tyler Cowen wrote a book about a decade ago called The Great Stagnation. Again, Robert Gordon has put out his own take on it in that book and his other work.

Essentially what it says is that the last 50 years or so — say, since approximately 1970 — have seen slower progress in technology and industry as compared to the previous, say, 100 years. (To be very clear, stagnation does not mean zero progress.)

I was skeptical about this stagnation idea at first, especially when you look at the amazing progress of computers and the internet, until I started studying progress more broadly. And eventually, I came around.

What convinced me was simply looking at how many different parts of the economy were making progress as rapid as computers and the internet, about 100 years prior. If you take the 1970-through-2020 period where we had computers and the internet, and you compare that to 1870 to 1920, in that period you had an equivalent revolution in communications technology with the telephone and radio.

Four children sit in a row under a chalkboard that reads, “Polio immunization here.” Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images
Children await their polio vaccination, 1956.

At the same time, you also had about an equal magnitude revolution in electricity with the electric generator, motor, and light bulb. You had an equivalent kind of revolution in the internal combustion engine and the automobile and the airplane. You had the first synthetic fertilizers with the Haber Bosch process, you had the first plastics, with Bakelite. Plus, that was also the period in which the germ theory was developed and applied in the first chlorinated water systems, and vaccines for new diseases. You have, like, five revolutions all going on at the same time.

Computers and the internet are as big as any one of those revolutions. But as big as all five of them stacked up together? I don’t think you can really make that case.

Kelsey Piper

If I were trying to imagine what’s going on there, I would wonder, was it obvious at the time that these five things were revolutionary? Is it possible that, you know, in 2060 or 2160, when we’re looking back on the 2020s, we’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the time when there were five simultaneous revolutions in synthetic biology and in artificial intelligence and in some other things”? Maybe it’s hard to tell at the time which inventions are big ones?

Jason Crawford

You might be right. Certainly, the two you named are probably the most promising things [in terms of], “if we pull out of stagnation in the coming decades, where would it come from?” But the things that I named were clearly revolutionary at the time. What we’re seeing today is potential breakthroughs on the horizon. They’re just not quite here yet.

At the same time, you know, we can also look back over the last 50 to 70 years, at the revolutions that people thought were coming and didn’t quite arrive, or arrived and then failed.

Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images
An aerial view of Calder Hall in Cumbria, Britain’s first nuclear power station, which opened in 1956.

And so the three big ones that I think of off the top of my head are nuclear power, space travel, and supersonic air travel. I think that the people of the 1950s would be amazed if you told them that nuclear power today, 70 years later, only supplies about 10 percent of world electricity. That is sort of a stunted revolution.

Space travel, of course — we went to the moon and then Apollo was canceled. The Concorde never became really economical, and certainly never became affordable to a wide audience, and ultimately ended up getting canceled. There’s a gap of decades where there was no progress or even regress in those fields.

Kelsey Piper

On the human well-being front, people talk a lot about how it doesn’t necessarily seem like life is a lot better than it was 40 years ago (at least in rich countries — obviously poor countries have been growing in recent decades and that’s really important). Is that part of the stagnation hypothesis?

Jason Crawford

Yeah, absolutely. I would also clarify that the stagnation hypothesis is really about the technological frontier. It’s not about catch-up growth in other countries, which has been good.

Life expectancy is something where [the world] made a ton of progress in the last century and a half or so. A lot of that progress came from the conquest of infectious disease. Just about 150 years ago, we figured out germ theory.

We were also able to develop new vaccines — there was a gap of almost a century from the first vaccine for smallpox in 1796 to the second human vaccine for rabies in 1885. After that, we’ve gotten on average one or two vaccines per decade, continuing to the present day.

And then the third major thing really was the antibiotics revolution. The golden age of antibiotics from the late ’30s to the early ’50s or so was huge. Prior to the late ’30s, mortality rates in the US are declining at something like 2.7 or 2.8 percent per year. And then when you hit that period, they start declining at about 8 percent per year. And then after that, again, it goes back to a 2 percent per year decrease until the 1980s.

So those three things — sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics — were the big things driving life expectancy in the 20th century. But we’ve hit something of a plateau.

Kelsey Piper

So what is the diagnosis of progress studies about all of this? What do you see as the key drivers of progress? How is that applicable to ending stagnation today?

Jason Crawford

I don’t think there’s consensus within the folks who look at progress. But I have three basic hypotheses.

One is, at the most basic level, cultural attitudes toward progress. In the 19th century, especially the late 19th century, Western culture in general was extremely positive on progress, deeply believed that it was something that everybody can see happening around them. And they felt it was that technological and industrial progress, in particular, the scientific progress underlying that, were fundamentally a good thing for humanity. And all around people can see the improvements to well-being coming from progress.

In the 20th century, this pendulum swung the other way. Especially in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, many people in the West became much more fearful, skeptical, distrustful of technology and industry and perhaps even science. Sci-fi turned much more dystopian.

The environmentalist movement was also extremely concerned about overpopulation, and some of the movement’s leaders opposed any advance in energy technology. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy … would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Fundamentally, a society gets what it values, and when it stops valuing progress it stops getting it, even if that takes a generation or two for you to see the full effects.

Another part is essentially the burden of overregulation. Jerusalem Demsas had an article recently about why we can’t build that touched on this: We’ve grown up just an enormous layer of bureaucracy and regulations around getting anything done.

I think this is a good hypothesis that this was a major factor in the nuclear industry. The regulators (the AEC, and later their successor the NRC) ended up ratcheting radiation standards well beyond what is necessary to protect human health, which caused the costs of nuclear to skyrocket. Community opposition added (in some cases) years of delays, which caused projects to run over schedule and face increased financing costs. By the mid-1970s, nuclear just became unprofitable, and we stopped investing in it.

A man in a lab coat uses tongs to take a substance out of a test tube held behind a shield. George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images
A chemist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, established in 1947 in Upton, New York, dissolves lithium nitrate so radioactive fluorine 18 can be separated out.

The rationale behind that is preventing harm and protecting people’s rights. But very often, the types of regulations that we have, I think, are not actually giving us safety, they’re giving us safety theater.

The third major factor that I see is the way that we have organized the funding and management of scientific research and overall R&D since about World War II. Since then, starting in around the ’50s and ’60s, we’ve seen a major consolidation of research funding into a small number of centralized government agencies, especially the NIH, which is now our biggest.

The thing about scientific research is that the character of what is going to be the next scientific breakthrough, the next paradigm-busting discovery, is just so hard to predict that I think anytime you have a centralized, homogenous mechanism for directing research, you end up with the potential for blind spots. You end up with the potential for sort of quashing something that would be the next breakthrough because it doesn’t fit the status quo.

So I suspect that we have somewhat hamstrung ourselves by having too much centralization. And in particular, NIH and NSF have been criticized, and I suspect rightly, for relying too much on consensus mechanisms like committee-based peer review. I think there is a case to be made for, if nothing else, less of a monoculture and much more diversified mechanisms for funding research and development.

Kelsey Piper

Our society doesn’t value progress? Silicon Valley is very enthusiastic about “start a company and change the world.” Elon Musk is at least sometimes the richest person in the world, and nobody can argue that he hasn’t been inventing lots of stuff. In what sense are we failing to value progress in a way that we would if we still had the late-19th-century attitudes about it?

Jason Crawford

I think the modern mindset is very mixed about it and very conflicted. We see some of the value of progress, but the immediate reaction to any new development is to worry about how it could go wrong or be misused.

I do think [that skepticism] is because the late-19th-century view of progress was somewhat naive. People were oblivious to the real risks and problems of progress.

We can’t go back to the 19th-century sort of naive optimism. We have to go forward with a new synthesis that combines a fundamental optimism about progress with a more mature and wise and prudent approach to the risks and problems of technology.

In the 19th century, people talked unequivocally and unapologetically about the conquest of nature. Nature was seen as not a loving mother, nurturing and protecting us, but rather an enemy to be fought. People believed uncontroversially that it was possible for humanity to improve on nature.

There were efforts to improve on nature by importing species of plants and animals from non-native habitats. This ended up causing a lot of problems in terms of introducing invasive pest species. We realized, oh, we actually have to be really careful about just importing species willy-nilly and “improving on nature.”

Kelsey Piper

Another example of the “progress mindset” doing terrible harm that comes to mind is the eugenics movement of the 1920s.

Jason Crawford

This is the other huge important theme, which is that technology alone does not lead to a better world. It can only lead to a better world in the context of good moral and social systems.

One thing that I do deeply believe is that our scientific and material technology has raced ahead of our moral and social technology. We need some catch-up growth in moral and social technology.

Migrants, many from Haiti, at an encampment along the Del Rio International Bridge in Texas on September 21. Some Haitian immigrants at the border had not found asylum elsewhere after the 2010 Haiti earthquake that devastated the country.

As Lindskoog says, what Haitians are experiencing is the kind of calamity that asylum was designed for in the period following World War II: “It is their legal right to seek asylum.”

However, some migrants hoping for asylum are instead being chased down and shut out at the border — images show them being removed from airplanes in Port-au-Prince with their belongings scattered on the airport’s tarmac — while an undisclosed number are being allowed into the United States. Biden’s decision to fly Haitians back to deadly circumstances, under a Trump-era policy, underscores the United States’ longstanding animus toward Black migrants.

I talked to Lindskoog about the history of Haitian migrant detention in the US and why America has consistently rolled out harsh policies for Haitians, without displaying compassion for immigrants from the embattled Caribbean nation. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Fabiola Cineas

This week, images and video of Border Patrol agents mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian migrants at the southern border sparked national outrage. The images depicted officials using horse reins, which many likened to whips, to control the movement of the Haitians. Can you tell me what came to mind when you saw those images?

Carl Lindskoog

The images are horrible. I agree with everyone who said it was so terribly resonant of the long history of anti-Black racism and racial violence. Those images bring a lot of strands of history together, from why the Border Patrol was created, to how violent that institution has been, to how our modern policing system comes from the enforcement of slavery. And then there is how our immigration system has been criminalized and merged into our criminal justice system, both of which have anti-Black elements. What’s happening at the border is horrifying and fits into the long intersecting history of anti-Black, anti-immigrant sentiment and anti- Haitian exclusion.

Fabiola Cineas

Let’s talk more about the Border Patrol’s racist history, which has been well documented and began with its formation in the early 1920s as a kind of brotherhood with KKK members and racist Texas Rangers. Can you tell me more about how these origins were likely at play in Del Rio with Haitian migrants?

Carl Lindskoog

There is a really good book about this by Kelly Lytle Hernández called Migra! A History of The U.S. Border Patrol, in which she describes how the creation of the US Border Patrol in 1924 happened amidst a much broader anti-immigrant moment. There was the national Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 that placed new racist immigration quotas and exclusions as part of American immigration policy.

It was the gatekeeping mechanism at the time for keeping out who we don’t want to come across on American shores. [Author’s note: For example, the law favored migration from Northern and Western European countries and decreased the annual immigration cap from 350,000 to 165,000.]

Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
“Aliens” apprehended by the Border Patrol await questioning in Brownsville, Texas, in September 1984.

Simultaneously, the Border Patrol — which evolved out of a longer history of anti-migrant, anti-Mexican white supremacist violence along the US borderlands — was introduced to police to control the movement of Mexican migrants in particular, but also other people who might cross the southern border.

Fabiola Cineas

Yes, many people tend to only think of Mexican migrants trying to cross the southern border. But there are people from Caribbean countries taking long, arduous treks across water and through numerous nations and terrains to seek American asylum. For example, reports have suggested that many of the more than 14,000 Haitian migrants who were camped under the Del Rio International Bridge had actually left Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and had stopped in places like Brazil and Chile but have been on the move to Mexico due to various circumstances. What kinds of conditions have these migrants faced in the past 10 or so years?

Carl Lindskoog

From what I’ve learned from organizations like the Haitian Bridge Alliance and from reporters who have gone down to places like Brazil to report on conditions, especially after the economic downturn and other crises in Brazil, is that they couldn’t stay there. So they went to Chile and didn’t have the greatest reception there and sometimes faced a harrowing journey through jungles and across borders.

There’s a gigantic immigration detention facility in southern Mexico, where Mexico does a lot of the dirty work of the United States by detaining people who’ve crossed the border with Guatemala. If they got out of there, and were able to make it through the dangerous terrain up to the US-Mexico border, that is a major act of survival because of everything that they had to face in coming so many miles and facing so many police forces, prisons, and natural challenges. And then to see the images and read the reports that they’re living in that large encampment now, and just trying to get food and water and then to face that violent reprisal by the US Border Patrol — it’s just unimaginable.

Fabiola Cineas

And how does this modern-day situation compare to the kind of treatment Haitian migrants have traditionally received over the past couple of decades, whether they’re entering through the southern border or trying to get to Florida’s shores by boat?

Carl Lindskoog

They have, for most of history, been met with exclusion. During the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, most Haitians were coming on student visas or tourist visas, and then if they didn’t have authorization to stay, they were overstaying their visa. There were also a number of political exiles. So they weren’t really on the radar and seen as a big problem. They were establishing themselves in neighborhoods in New York primarily, and in Boston and elsewhere in Canada.

It’s really in the early to mid-1970s when the so-called “boat people,” which is a different demographic — more working-class, urban, displaced Haitians — started to come by boats and ships, trying to make it to American shores. When they tried to put in asylum claims was when they started to be more on the radar of American authorities.

That triggered this racist backlash, especially in South Florida, because it was at a moment when there was already a racist backlash to the civil rights movement. So to have all these poor unauthorized migrants who don’t speak English, that are Black, showing up, there’s this really racist reaction.

AP
Haitians refugees arrive at Mayport in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1976. They had been adrift in an 18-foot boat for five days.

South Floridians started to put pressure on their local officials, who then turned to Washington, and there was a very concerted effort to keep Haitians out. The Carter administration introduced something called the Haitian Program — a punishing set of policies designed to deter Haitians from coming in. And if they were already here, it tried to keep them out of the mainstream population. That meant putting them in detention facilities and local jails, basically denying them carte blanche their asylum claims and just sending them back.

There was a big legal challenge in 1980, Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti, where Haitian migrants and their advocates got a federal judge named James Lawrence King to recognize in a ruling that this practice was not only discriminatory but also racist. Haitians were being excluded because they were Black and because they were Haitian. King overturned the Haitian Program, but the Carter administration worked to circumvent it like subsequent administrations would.

When the Reagan administration came into power, they introduced a new Haitian detention program and the policy of interdiction, in which Coast Guard cutters would intercept boats of Haitian asylum seekers before they could even reach land and send them back, often to violence and death in Haiti. That process continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The Biden administration’s mass denial of asylum claims, which they’re doing by invoking Title 42 — a 2020 Trump administration coronavirus policy that has been used to expel more than a million migrants without hearings before an immigration judge — is not something new. This is something that both Republican and Democratic administrations have done, and it very much fits with the long history of the US government denying the legitimacy of Haitians’ asylum claims and sending them to a dangerous and often deadly situation.

Fabiola Cineas

It seems presidents of all backgrounds and in both parties have engaged in harm toward Haiti and Haitian migrants. US involvement in Haiti has often led to periods of instability there, but then the US has at times in the past turned around and interned Haitians at Guantanamo.

Carl Lindskoog

The coup d’état against Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, happened when George H.W. Bush was in power, and he sort of paid lip service to the illegitimate military government that was ruling after Aristide was put out of office. But Bush refused to accept Haitian asylum seekers and did everything the US government could to keep Haitians from being able to seek safe haven, even though the human rights atrocities after the coup were well-documented.

There was another set of legal challenges and legal battles in the courts to give Haitians asylum, some of which were somewhat successful, but that’s the period when Guantanamo was first established as an offshore prison to try to serve as a buffer for people whom you don’t even want to allow to get to American shores to seek asylum. And Haitians were the first Guantanamo detainees.

When Bill Clinton was running for president and trying to defeat George H.W. Bush, he promised to reverse that. A lot of Americans and people around the world were indignant about the Bush administration’s treatment of Haitians. “Of course we’re gonna let Haitians in,” Clinton said. But after he was elected, he reversed course and turned his back on the Haitians and said, “Well, we don’t want to trigger another humanitarian crisis by taking people because then more people will go out on this perilous journey across the ocean.” He was trying to invoke humanitarian reasons for still denying people the right to seek asylum.

Meanwhile, more Haitians filled up Guantanamo, some of whom were HIV positive and had AIDS. That began another chapter in what one scholar calls the carceral quarantine of Haitians for medical reasons. This was similar to what’s happening today because Title 42 is built on the basis of public health mandates to exclude people. While many people were forcibly returned from Guantanamo to Haiti, a number of those Haitians who remained at Guantanamo were able to make it to the United States after intense political and legal struggle. 

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

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Haitian refugees lined up in cots in the McCalla hangar in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 1991.

Fabiola Cineas

There’s historically also been a difference between how Cuban migrants and Haitian migrants have been treated, which many scholars point out is based on skin color. Is it useful to compare the plight of various migrant groups trying to make it into the United States?

Carl Lindskoog

I think it is useful. I think there are a lot of interesting polarities in the experience of Haitians and Cubans in how they come to the United States. The best example of course was the summer of 1980 when more than 100,000 Cubans came by boat seeking asylum, and so did approximately 15,000 Haitians.

The Refugee Act of 1980 had just passed, but it didn’t have clear instructions for how to treat vast numbers of asylum seekers, so initially, both Cubans and Haitians were placed in refugee camps on military bases across the United States. But pretty quickly, Cubans, for the most part, were released and allowed to be with family members and the Cuban community. Haitians languished in detention much longer.

For the Haitians that came after, a special piece of legislation was passed to adjust their status known as the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Act of 1980. But the Haitians that came after the act were again treated just like the ones that came before — excluded and barred. Cubans never suffered the same kind of exclusion or mass detention that Haitians did, despite the fact that they’re both coming from Caribbean nations and seeking asylum.

Fabiola Cineas

How do these exclusionary policies translate to how Haitians are treated once in America?

Carl Lindskoog

For the Haitian community and Haitian migrants in particular, they’ve repeatedly been targeted as disease carriers, which historically has also been a racialized notion not only of the foreign-born but especially of the nonwhite foreign-born. In the 1970s, their incarceration exclusion was sometimes justified on the basis that they were carrying tuberculosis. In the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, it became the notion that they were carrying AIDS. But Haitians said all along that singling them out is discriminatory because they aren’t any more likely to be diseased than other people. It is racialized stigmatization.

The same thing goes for criminalization. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration has documented how Black immigrants are much more likely to be incarcerated, how they spend much more time in detention, and how their asylum cases, deportation cases, and immigration appeals are much more likely to be denied. That’s part of how immigration enforcement blends into the criminal justice system and policing — now that there’s a criminalized racial immigration system, often a migrant’s first point of contact in this country is with law enforcement.

A lot of municipalities and localities have an agreement between their local law enforcement in the immigration system that they will refer any unauthorized or undocumented person or someone with some kind of immigration issue over to the immigration system. They then get put into the immigration system based on some racialized reading about who they are and are disproportionately likely to be detained or deported.

Fabiola Cineas

So it’s clear that Haitian migrants are particularly demonized and criminalized, but I also think another element to their story is erasure. It feels like not many people know about this history. Even in the past decade or so, conversations about immigrants tend to leave out Black immigrants in general. Research from the nonprofit organization RAICES found that 44 percent of families that ICE locked up during the pandemic last year were Haitian and that this information was underreported.

A February 2021 report from the American Immigration Council stated that at one detention center in 2020, nearly half of the families threatened with family separation were Black and originated from Haiti, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Afro-Latino communities in Latin America. What does the erasure signify?

Carl Lindskoog

Black migrants, Black immigrants, and Black asylum seekers are often left out of discussions of immigration, immigrant rights, and immigrant justice. In the media, when we are having these big national debates, we tend to think more about Central Americans and other Latin Americans, not the Caribbean so much. And, of course, in recent years, there were large numbers of displaced people coming from Central America — and that’s part of why that drew the attention.

But it’s also true that Haitians only appear from time to time in conversation, and it’s not understood that their experiences track really closely to a lot of other asylum seekers.

John Moore/Getty Images
Haitians have sought asylum at US borders for decades, but presidential administrations since at least the 1970s have practiced exclusion against them.

Fabiola Cineas

Even with the current attention being paid to the treatment of Haitian migrants, it’s still unclear how the United States is going to decide which Haitians they allow in and which they don’t. The Biden administration’s initial response was to schedule seven flights a day to send Haitians at the border back. But then the Associated Press reported that Haitians were being released to El Paso, Texas; Arizona; and other places for 60 days before they’d have to appear at an immigration office. There’s not much transparency about how these decisions are being made.

Carl Lindskoog

​​The Biden administration is under intense political pressure from different sides and from different interests, just as previous administrations have been. The administration is trying to maintain its image as being very different from the Trump administration, especially when it comes to racism and anti-immigrant nativist xenophobia, but I don’t believe that his policies have yet proven to be very different.

[Vice President] Kamala Harris can stand there and say she is horrified, and [press secretary] Jen Psaki can say the same. But the whole reason the inhumane treatment of Haitians is happening is because the Biden administration is continuing the Trump administration’s illegitimate and unjustified use of Title 42, which is a way of denying the asylum process to which Haitians and all other people are entitled, by both our own federal law and international law.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorcas made a strong statement to migrants saying that if they come here illegally, they’re going to be removed, that they are going to fail. But it’s not illegal to claim asylum. It is a legal right to claim asylum. Migrants have to have a legitimate fear of past or future persecution in their home country on the basis of a number of categories — if they can prove that, then they’ve proven their asylum case and are supposed to be allowed to stay.

Fabiola Cineas

Many activists have used the phrase “Haitians are owed.” There’s this idea that the world owes Haiti and has played a role in its plight. What do you think about this in the context of what took place at the border this week?

Carl Lindskoog

We do all owe Haitians for the Haitian Revolution, which successfully ended in 1804 and was the most sweeping human rights revolution in all of human history. Haitian liberation, first from slavery and then from colonialism and achieving independence, was a victory for all enslaved, oppressed people, including Black Americans.

In many ways, Haitians, sadly, because they’ve so often been targeted by racism and injustice, have kept fighting in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s in this country and in others. Their determination to liberate themselves and other people they’ve struggled alongside continues to be a model for how all incarcerated, enslaved, and otherwise abused people can find their liberation. That’s one major reason we owe a debt of gratitude to Haitians.

That’s even more reason to fight alongside them for justice today at the US-Mexico border and wherever they encounter racism and discrimination.

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