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Coming to America: a Narrative of a Journey of Hope

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Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 550 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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The decision to immigrate, the farewell, the arrival, the initial struggles, the sense of wonder, the american dream realized.

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Coming to America : a history of immigration and ethnicity in American life

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What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti

A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence. 

The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.

But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions. 

“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada. 

What is happening in Haiti and why?

In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S. 

When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.

Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes . With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate. 

Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N . released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.

“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.

Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided , leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.

Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.

Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. 

Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”

Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder . One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”

But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months. 

Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.

Haiti's uncertain future

A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis. 

But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years. 

Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti , intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.

“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”

In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold . Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself. 

“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses . So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought , but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”  

Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.  

Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern. 

“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press .

Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians. 

In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis . The commission has proposed the “ Montana Accord ,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections. 

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

CORRECTION (March 15, 2024, 9:58 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated which university Jemima Pierre is affiliated with. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, not the University of California, Los Angeles, (or Columbia University, as an earlier correction misstated).

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.

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Why Are Lawmakers Trying to Ban TikTok Instead of Doing What Voters Actually Want?

By Julia Angwin

Ms. Angwin is a contributing Opinion writer and an investigative journalist.

America is politically polarized. But there is an issue on which both sides agree: We need more privacy, and TikTok should not be banned.

A record 72 percent of Americans want “more government regulation” of what companies can do with their data, according to an October report from Pew Research Center . And only 31 percent of Americans favor a nationwide ban on TikTok, according to a February Associated Press/NORC opinion poll .

Despite public sentiment, the U.S. House passed legislation on Wednesday by an overwhelming majority that could force TikTok to divest from control by its Chinese parent company or be banned. Its fate in the Senate is not clear.

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, and American lawmakers say they are pursuing a ban in the name of protecting U.S. data from the Chinese government. But lawmakers are not pursuing comprehensive federal privacy legislation that would protect Americans’ data on all the apps they use.

This is, sadly, just more evidence of how removed federal lawmaking has become from the will of the people. Issues with wide popular support such as abortion access and gun control remain unaddressed at the federal level. And a majority of Americans say that government policies do not reflect public opinion on key issues.

Despite this growing divide, it is truly stunning that lawmakers feel comfortable pushing a TikTok ban during a high-stakes election year. After all, one-third of U.S. adults say they use the site , and one-third of U.S. adults under 30 say they regularly get their news on TikTok . Even President Biden, despite saying he would sign the ban into law if it made it to his desk, just started a TikTok channel for his re-election campaign .

Some members of Congress, such as Representative Jeff Jackson, a North Carolina Democrat, regularly use TikTok to communicate with their constituents. Mr. Jackson, who voted for the bill, has 2.5 million followers on the site. “My message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican and one of the bill’s sponsors.

The legislation seeks to bar the distribution within the United States of “foreign adversary controlled applications such as TikTok” unless it sells itself within six months to a buyer that is approved by the U.S. president.

The rush to pass this bill is particularly odd because the federal government already has a process for dealing with foreign entities buying stakes in domestic companies. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is an interagency body that reviews foreign investments for national security concerns. For instance, it was a review by the committee that caused a Chinese buyer to reverse its acquisition of the dating app Grindr in 2020.

The committee and TikTok have been negotiating for years over how to mitigate the national security concerns. After Donald Trump while president ordered the committee to investigate , TikTok offered a plan that would have transferred all its data on U.S. citizens to a U.S. subsidiary that would be overseen by Oracle. Oracle would have also overseen TikTok’s algorithms and content takedown decisions on behalf of the U.S. government. But the U.S. government rejected it for reasons that have not been disclosed, and it appears the negotiations have reached an impasse.

But the tricky thing is that forcing TikTok to sell would not solve the problems that lawmakers claim they are trying to address. Selling TikTok to a big tech company such as Google, Meta or Microsoft — after all, who else could afford its estimated price of $84 billion ? — would not make U.S. users’ data more secure. In fact, it would simply give the tech giant buying it a new trove of information about all of us that the new owner could use to enhance its already astoundingly detailed portraits.

Right now, for example, Google has most of my email, my documents, my web-browsing behavior and my search queries. The videos I watch on TikTok are, in fact, among the few things it doesn’t have. Adding those videos would add valuable new data to its dossier on me and allow it to monetize it with advertisers, data brokers and anyone else that uses its self-service online advertising platforms and services.

Sure, maybe in the worst-case scenario, the Chinese government is spying on my viewing of TikTok videos. (TikTok, of course, says that its Chinese parent company is entirely separate from the U.S. entity.) But TikTok doesn’t have much more data than any other app; all it knows is that I spend too much time watching cooking videos and makeup tutorials. This information probably helps China in its endless quest to provide all of the material goods that I buy, from kitchen equipment to makeup brushes, but it was already manufacturing those goods anyway, so my feeling is that my viewing data is just additional information about potential future demand for products.

OK, fine, you say, but what about the Chinese propaganda that is being spread through TikTok? I’ve read the same scare stories, and all I can say is that they aren’t that convincing. Referring to the People’s Republic of China, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated in its February threat assessment that “TikTok accounts run by a P.R.C. propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

That sounds terrifying until you consider that anyone can set up a TikTok account to target anyone during an election. We know, for instance, that Russians set up accounts on Facebook to try to influence U.S. elections in 2016. And they didn’t have to buy Facebook to do that. It’s also worth noting that the threat assessment does not allege that TikTok’s algorithm promoted the People’s Republic of China accounts — and I’m guessing that if the director of national intelligence’s office had evidence of that, it would have stated it.

And it’s not clear that the intelligence community has better evidence that it is providing behind closed doors. After a national security briefing on TikTok for members of Congress, Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, told The Associated Press : “Not a single thing that we heard in today’s classified briefing was unique to TikTok. It was things that happen on every single social media platform.”

Meanwhile, China appears to be having plenty of success pushing its political agenda through influencers on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram , according to a 2022 Associated Press investigation.

And that’s my point. All of the social media platforms are information minefields, rife with deceptive content from state actors, corporations, paid influencers and others. Their algorithms fuel our worst impulses by highlighting content that promotes anger and outrage. They strip mine our data to make money.

Forcing TikTok to merge with another data-hungry social media platform won’t solve any of that. What will make a difference is establishing base-line privacy rules that prohibit companies from exploiting our data and that give us control over the algorithms used to manipulate us.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Julia Angwin, a contributing Opinion writer and the founder of Proof News , writes about tech policy. You can follow her on Twitter or Mastodon or her personal newsletter .