Bobby Philippeaux brings Carnival to Haitian diaspora in Florida

For the past week, I was in the southern coastal town of Les Cayes, where Haiti’s national Carnival celebration was held this year. I helped Jacob Kushner, a friend and journalist who has been reporting from Haiti for more than a year, produce a radio story on Carnival for WLRN, a South Florida NPR affiliate. Here is how WLRN described the piece:

This week millions of people across Haiti will parade in elaborate costumes and dance to the blaring horns of rara and Haitian pop music as they celebrate the nation’s largest cultural event of the year, Carnival. As Jacob Kushner reports from Port-au-Prince, one Haitian-born Florida man is working to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants living in South Florida will be able to join them in spirit.

You can listen to the story via this audio post. Jacob did the interview and voiceovers for the piece; I recorded all the in-the-moment sounds from Carnival—rara bands marching through the parade route, chanting and singing of performers, ambient street sounds.

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Low-skilled immigration and the American working class

In his New York Times column yesterday, Ross Douthat addressed Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart. The book is about the decline of what Murray calls America’s “founding virtues” within the U.S. working class and the consequences of that decline. Douthat was unsatisfied with Murray’s policy conclusions and offered four of his own, one of which focused on low-skilled immigration and its effects on the working class:

If we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

His argument is dubious.

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Haitian emigrants look North, South

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that Haiti would be added to the list of 53 countries whose citizens can apply for temporary work visas. Under the H-2A and H-2B temporary visa programs, immigrants are allowed to work in seasonal positions for up to 12 months, with the possibility of extending stays for up to three years.

The temporary visa programs are fraught with red tape and inflexible restrictions, but allowing more Haitians to work in the United States undeniably brings benefits, not only for emigrants but also for, say, farmers in southern states who have had trouble finding laborers after crackdowns on illegal immigration.

But in the two years since the January 12 earthquake, Haitians emigrants haven’t been looking only North.

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Obama administration pushes for more nuanced deportation decisions; union stands in way

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) training course for law enforcement officials and prosecutors is being held up by union “politics”:

The training course is the clearest sign yet that administration officials want to transform the way immigration officers work, asking them to make nuanced decisions to speed deportations of high-risk offenders while halting those of illegal immigrants with clean records and strong ties to the country…

But in a new sign of the deep dissension over immigration, the union representing 7,000 deportation officers of the agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has not allowed its members to participate in the training. Without the formal consent of the union, the administration’s strategy could be significantly slowed for months in labor negotiations.

In October, the union’s president, Chris Crane, told a House Judiciary subcommittee, “Law enforcement and public safety have taken a back seat to attempts to satisfy immigrant advocacy groups.” A federal agency’s prerogative about training its employees taking a back seat to union advocacy groups is apparently not something that worries him.

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Alabama cracks down on illegal immigration, farmers wonder who will help them at harvest time

At reason, I write about the latest attempt by a southern state to crack down on illegal immigration. Yesterday, a U.S. district court judge upheld most sections of a new law designed to curb illegal immigration:

Farmers in Alabama now worry whether they’ll be able to hire enough laborers for harvests, and they’ve got plenty of reason to fret given the situation one state over. Georgia passed a similar law cracking down on illegal immigration last spring, only to face a shortage of migrant farm workers shortly thereafter. “The labor shortage is potentially putting hundreds of millions of dollars in crops at risk, say state agricultural industry leaders,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in June.

Also, as Tuscaloosa prepares to rebuild after a devastating tornado tore through town last spring, its residents are worried about the law driving construction workers — many of whom are immigrants — out of town.

Read the post here.

Haitians head east

A New York Times’ front-webpage story yesterday reported on growing Dominican impatience with Haitians refugees.

The police and military near the border, with little more to go on than darker skin color and a failure to produce identification, have stopped cars and buses and forced them to Haiti, human rights groups say.

…

Dominican officials say they have borne the brunt of both quake refugees and recent economic migrants, adding to a steady flow of people from Haiti who have slipped through the porous border for decades to cut sugar cane, harvest coffee beans, work construction and do other low-wage jobs.

According to the piece, the Dominican Republic’s immigration director estimates that 500,000 Haitians live in the Dominican, and the flow of immigrants has only increased since the January 2010 earthquake. That’s a jump-off-the-screen estimate, given thatabout the same number of Haitians live in the United States. The Dominican’s entire population is only about 10 million.

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This bridge comes from China, and it’s kind of cool

On Saturday morning, the New York Times ran a story about a bridge that’s being manufactured in Shanghai and will eventually link San Francisco to Oakland. By having the bridge built by Chinese manufacturer Zhenhua, before eventually shipping it to the West Coast for assembly, California officials estimate that the state will save $400 million.

The reporter writes that, unsurprisingly, “American steelworker unions have disparaged the Bay Bridge contract by accusing the state of California of sending good jobs overseas and settling for what they deride as poor-quality Chinese steel.” The piece also notes Chinese “quality control problems ranging from tainted milk to poorly built schools,” as if America is immune to having outbreaks of food contamination and building poor structures.

The top three comments on the piece, which combined were recommended by 500+ readers, decried jobs outsourced overseas, lamented future drives across the Made in China bridge, and referenced Abraham Lincoln spouting protectionist propaganda. These sentiments aren’t surprising, or isolated. Last fall an NBC/WSJ poll found that a majority of both union workers and tea partiers believe that free trade has hurt the United States. The result was the same in the poll of Americans generally.

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