interviews
Reshaping The Immigration Narrative
by Lizania Cruz
July 15, 2019
This conversation with Albert Saint Jean and Lizania Cruz was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Albert: My name is Albert Saint Jean. I am the New York City organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration [BAJI].
When I heard about BAJI, this was before Trump, I had gotten interested in volunteering, in organizing with BAJI, because a lot of the stuff they were focused on were things I’d seen throughout my life. I was born here, but I was the first of my grandmother's children born here. Everyone older than me had migrated over and I saw what they had to go through with their status, their relationship with law enforcement, their relationship with the criminal justice system, their fear of deportation. I felt like BAJI was at the nexus of a lot of those things when I found out about it three years ago – and long before Trump, because they were things affecting black people. Basically I got into it because it spoke to the things that I saw in my own personal experiences.
Lizania: I'm Lizania Cruz. I'm an artist and a designer originally from the Dominican Republic. I moved here in 2004 when I was 21 to finish college. I started We The News – doing work around shifting the current narrative on migration and trying to figure out how we [people] change.
As we move into different geographic spaces what is our greater sense of belonging and home throughout that?
I was frustrated with the way the current immigration narrative was – only talking about the majority within the minority group, and how the media was taking over the narrative. I didn't feel represented. I didn't feel like our stories were pluralistic in any way. So I started wondering what if we told our own news and our own stories – what would that look like? That's how We The News as a project started. I was talking to different organizations and someone recommended BAJI. I thought it was super interesting how they were talking about migration, blackness, and at the same time talking about the correlation of that and the criminal justice system, which for me, no other organization was doing. Getting involved with BAJI has made the project what it is today. It has also politicized me in ways I wasn't thinking about.
Image via Lizania Cruz, center, with Albert Saint Jean, 3rd from the left.
What are those ways?
Lizania: Looking more at the similarities between disenfranchised communities already in the US and the immigrant movement. Again, I don't think we do that as often, and now I'm constantly thinking of ways that story could be told, and what are the lengths, and how do we organize collectively rather than organize in silos. We're organizing for LatinX folks and maybe labor workers, and we're organizing for people that have been affected by mass incarceration, why are those two things not organized in tandem while looking at the policies in the same way?
You mentioned you feel like the narrative is not pluralistic.
Lizania: Yeah.
And very mono.
Lizania: Exactly.
Does the division of groups fighting for their specific causes as separate give their stories more autonomy? If all these issues are nuanced, where do they blend and how do you deliver a message that covers, or even touches on, all of the personal?
Albert: Particularly with BAJI, they look at the nexus between the similarities between African Americans and black immigrants.
The most common thread we find, is that number one, we all look at each other through a white supremacist lens.
When we talk about the immigration issue, we shy away from the racial aspect of it. This is a racial issue. The diversity of immigrants we have now is only possible because of the rights that African Americans fought for in the early 60s. The 1965 Immigration Act was a part of that, the whole civil rights act. That allowed for the diversity of other immigrants to come here. When we shy away from that, we miss a large swath of what's going on in the immigrant community. We miss talking about what are the drivers that send people here in the first place?
US policy is responsible for a large bulk of us being here. My family wouldn't have come here if it wasn't for the United States supporting a dictator for so long. Her [Lizania’s] country wouldn't be the way it is if it wasn't for US agribusinesses and foreign policy.
Where did your family come from?
Albert: Haiti.
Another place that they [US] supported dictatorships. It's kind of like the stories we're able to show the common thread is US policy, and a lot of it is the racialized aspect of immigration in the United States.
Lizania: I'll add to that. I see specifically in the work that we've been doing with We the News, a creation of a platform where all these stories could live together. There's not as many platforms like that. Finding a place and a platform where people could come together and share their stories and have a voice. None of us are the same and we all have different experiences, but how the commonality becomes the difference, is always what I'm interested in questioning.
Even when we facilitate the story circles, we open with a prompt that is the same for everyone. But nobody responds the same way. How do these stories sit together and how do we make a space for that to happen?
The personal narrative is a driver for policy in this case. Are you guys interested in changing policy?
Albert: Exposing policy, changing policy. Those are important. But I think with my work, what's even more important is changing structural issues.
Is policy complicit in structural issues?
Albert: Well, there's policies that are a symptom of structural racism. Most people look at the Trump era as, for what it is, a terrible era, especially for immigration. But these problems have been going on long before that. The 1996 laws were implemented after Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City. A provision they made was that anybody that commits a crime that's a foreign national would be deported. Whether it’s retroactive or not, you don't even have to be convicted. A lot of people I come across aren't convicted. Yes, it's policy driven, but a lot of it is also sustainable. I'd say a majority of this is systemic. So yeah, there's policies that are pushing against it – but also these narratives show the systemic issues I see as well.
Lizania: It's a way of popular education. I think policy is important, but I think you have to start from the bottom up and create the popular education. People vaguely understand where all these issues are coming from. And you could potentially organize to create policy – but even at BAJI, those who are organizing and those who are going to Congress to affect policy, are different.
Albert: Yeah, that's true. Sometimes I'll go to DC and help lobby for certain things or meet with city officials along local issues. But the bulk of that work is in the hands of people who specialize in policy. Not that these folks have any faith in this system, it's just that they know that this is another strategy.
They know that the system is not broken. It is inherently working the way it's supposed to work.
They feel as though we still have to use policy as a tool. So my job is to create the pressure that Lizania is talking about. Creating a space for people in the community to not only learn about themselves and their rights, but also learn to advocate for themselves. The more they start to realize that their experience is not an anecdotal experience, that this is more of a trend than a norm, they're able to do all the things she just mentioned. That's an organizer's job. To make sure that education is there. When we look at past movements, it wasn't Malcolm X or Martin Luther King who started those movements. They came out of those respective movements, to articulate the needs of the people. We have to start somewhere. I think the more we share this with people, the more likely people are going to be able to fight for liberation so to speak.
What's your dream in this?
Albert: In an ideal world?
Yeah. What do you want immigration in America to look like? To feel like?
Albert: I would say the way it was when my grandmother came in, in the 70s. You just come here – I honestly don't believe in borders, to tell you the truth. But, in my lifetime, I would like for people that are undocumented to obtain amnesty, I would like for there not to be any caps or quotas, regardless of where people come from.
Lizania: I ask this question to myself all the time. We're doing this work but what does it look like when the work is done? I think that if this system runs how it's supposed to, there wouldn’t be quotas for the people that could come here.
Albert: Diversity visas.
Lizania: There won't be diversity visas. I was just having a meeting with my lawyer, and the type of visa I’m applying for has a two year backlog, and he's like, "that's actually nothing." Plus the amount of money that goes into the process. It's just not realistic.
It’s interesting to look at the immigration argument coming from the GOP in the 80s, Bush H.W. and Reagan in 1980 are wildly different than Ted Cruz today.
Albert: What a lot of people don't realize, and this is where I hate the two party system, for the reason you pointed out, is at one point in time the Republican party was way further to the left than Democrats now, than Obama. What Reagan did, the amnesty – and don't get me wrong, all the fuckery that's happened started with Reagan in this country, it started before, but Reagan really took it off – but he gave general amnesty in the 80s. This is someone who right wing people worship, you know what I mean? When I look at Democrats and I look at how they're like, "Oh no, be realistic. This is what we can fight for."
Pit Dreamers against everyone else. Good immigrant versus bad immigrant. All of that stuff is bogus to me. It shows me how far right the pendulum has swung.
When people claim to be moderate now and think, "Oh, I'm moderate, I'm in between. I understand both sides." No, you're a conservative. When you look at the historical analysis of it and how far right this country has gotten, how this country doesn't recognize that is even scarier. The fact that it is normalized, even on the democratic side, is scary. The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can be considered extreme, it's very scary because these were all basic ideas people had.
It's interesting you brought up this thing with Reagan and Bush. I mean, Republican, Democrat, they were always messed up. But Republicans were more strategic. Coming out of the New Deal Era, they knew they had to make concessions in certain places. Especially since they had a labor shortage for certain sectors of the economy. They needed the Bracero Program and domestic workers to come over. They were like, yeah, why would I be against this? They were very practical.
Wet foot dry foot for Cubans. If they made it to the mainland of the U.S., they automatically got a green card because they were fleeing communism. The Haitians, however, were fleeing a dictator who's indiscriminately massacring whole families, women, and children on the streets. 60,000 people were massacred underneath this dictatorship, and people were fleeing. I had family members who were fleeing, but they didn't have the same privileges Cubans had. Once their foot hit land they could be apprehended and found out. I just thought that aspect of it was very interesting to me. The US link. People magically forgot that the US created the situation in El Salvador and Honduras and all these places as late as the 80s, and no one's talking about that. Why are all these people showing up here?
Like our cognitive dissonance is...that's why I like us telling our own narratives. Because we don't forget.
Do you think there’s a lack of education in America about U.S. presence in Central and South America?
Albert: I think that's true globally. Even when we talk about the Middle East we're not really clear about the roots of all those problems.
Lizania: I did a poster that was also part of We the News looking at all of the different interventions in Latin America specifically by the US.
While you're critical of American actions abroad, are you also hopeful for the "promise" of America?
Albert: No, well, I'll say this. I'm hopeful if we can tear down the structures that we have now.
If the will of the people is truly reflected, if this can become an actual democracy in which politics takes a backseat to justice.
The majority of Americans want the same things. Majority of Americans do not care about if Lizania has access to citizenship or not. But politics makes us pit each other against each other. Politics is what uplifts white privilege and makes white folks say, "hey look, you know what? These immigrants and these black folks and these other folks are threatening my security." Politics does that. In reality, most Americans want the same thing and I think that the system we have now does not allow the will of the people to really be represented.
Lizania: If we aren't hopeful, why would we do it? With my work, I'm just trying to find ways that our reality could actually be a more inclusive, a better reality for all of us. I think the reason I do the work I do is because I believe that there could be a better way and that we have to construct that way for ourselves. Hopeful is not the right word. Let’s see how America could work for our communities in a better way. Or maybe it's not only America – how can we as people of the world, live better?
interviews
Energy Access Is The Foundation Of True Democratization
by Shazia Khan
February 13, 2019
This interview with Shazia Khan, an environmental lawyer, expert in off-grid clean energy solutions, and founder of EcoEnergy, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Can you tell me about your background and how you came to this work?
I'm a Pakistani-American. I visited Pakistan a lot as a child, and speak the language, so I have a lot of personal ties there. My professional background is as an environmental lawyer. Energy is my area of specialization. I started my career at the World Bank, but had this idea in my mind, even when I was in law school. How do we take something like energy access and make it a priority for the private sector? Which is often times the group that has the resources to make the changes that need to be changed. What can you structure to create incentive for them to get involved and support a social mission or goal?
The idea came in 2001, but since then so much has changed. This concept of social enterprise and entrepreneurship, which didn't have a name back then, started to evolve in a really beautiful way. A lot of companies in the private sector, and a lot of investment firms, decided that a triple bottom line, including an environmental and a social impact component to their investment decisions, was important. For whatever reason, it's important to them, whether it's part of the PR campaign, or whether it's genuinely important to them, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that some resource dollars are now being allocated towards social impact projects.
While I was at World Bank, my boss's boss was working on the Inga Dam Power Project. The World Bank decided they were going to increase their renewable energy portfolio by 20%. They started by building huge hydropower plants all over the world. The Inga Dam Power Project would have the ability to electrify all of Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they put it in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was and still is, quite conflict ridden.
Even if somehow the energy that was generated wasn't all diverted for industrial or commercial purposes, how was it going to trickle down to people living off the national electric grid? Would there be an incentive to electrify those people? The way energy access has unfolded in the West is through government subsidized programs. There's been grid expansion so that anybody, no matter how remote, within the country, will be electrified. But emerging economies and frontier markets don't have the money to do that. So what can they do? One thing they can do is leverage technology. Mobile technology has made a lot of things possible that weren't possible 20 years ago, certainly not 50 years ago.
I started thinking about, is there a more grassroots approach to electrification, and does it have to be as expensive as it is now? Does it have to be that a power plant has to be built, it has to cost millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, and then need to be very labor intensive? Even after the fact, the costs are so high, is the customer whose been connected able to pay for that service? Maybe not. I run across people all the time where power lines go over their homes in rural Pakistan, and they choose not to be connected because it might cost them $60 or $70 a month. The reason it's so expensive is because they're having to cover the cost of building that infrastructure.
What we do is called distributed solar. It's taking small solar home systems and putting them on the roofs of homes and small businesses. Some people are like, "That's cute, but it's not a long term solution. You really need to wait for the infrastructure for the grid connectivity."
That's really antiquated, and as soon as people found that cellular phones were actually much more convenient and much cheaper, they started adopting them in a widespread manner. That's happened all over the world, and wasn't anticipated. In this same way, I feel that distributed solar can be adopted, deployed rapidly, much more efficiently, and cheaply, than traditional grid expansion.
I did field work in 2008 in Pakistan, and in 2009 launched a non-profit called Eco Energy Finance. The purpose of Eco Energy Finance was to build a business case for affordable solar energy for off-grid people in Pakistan. We had to do extensive market research first to understand who this group of people were, what all the different segments were, and then what their purchasing power was? What their purchasing power was genuinely. Not, "Let's shove this product down their throats and hope that they can afford it, but what can they actually afford? And can we match a technology and a product to them, and distribute it to them?”
I met my co-founder in 2010. He was working on energy access surveys, and I had just received a very small grant. We decided to team up and build a skeletal team of 12 people to go and collect this data. We went to 44,000 households. Really trying to understand the true picture of what their lives were. We wanted to understand their consumer preferences without any sort of bias. What type of technology or what use cases are really going to fit their lifestyle? Then we spent three years market building.
We tested a number of different products, and within that time, a new technology became available. It's called "Pay-As-You-Go Solar." The concept is that in the same way somebody in a developing country will go every month and pay for their cell phone. Pay-As-You-Go technology for solar allows you to do the same thing. You go to the same mobile money agent and you give them a fee – we can remotely unlock the corresponding amount of electricity to them, and they get an automatic receipt on their cell phone. If they don't pay, we can shut the system off remotely. When they do pay again, we can turn it back on. It's just like a cell phone.
Only 13% of people in Pakistan have bank accounts. We're, at the same time, generating a credit score for them and deciding who we're going to take a bet on because ultimately what we're doing is financing the cost of a solar home system for them. We're buying it, they pay us a deposit, and then they give us monthly payments until the system is theirs. They can also pay rent every month and we can just perpetually rent the system to them.
We did that for seven years, had 200 customers, and a repayment rate of over 85%, which is pretty high. We decided, "Okay, this is a commercially viable model that we can take to investors." So we re-launched as Eco Energy Global. Eco Energy Finance, the non-profit still exists and we will use it again to go and explore other markets, but Eco Energy Global went out to raise investment money.
Things are going well, but it's been a long road.
To clarify, you’re using off-grid solar as your primary energy system? Do you feel like that's the future of energy? That everything will be private?
I think we'll get a happy medium. For instance, our customers all have these independent solar systems on their houses. But that's because they're coming from having zero demand, to now having a little bit. Eventually we’ll have to connect them. We’re going to be piloting a mini grid next year. I think what will end up happening is that people will either have community based micro or mini grids, and they will be able to plug and play the systems they already have into that system.
Alternatively, in areas that are much more established, I think there will be a way for private, maybe community based solar to feed into and supplement the grid that already exists. I don't think in developed countries the grid is going away necessarily. It's relatively affordable. It's relatively efficient. But I think there are other ways to have an interface between these newer technologies where people feel like they have more say and more control in the fuel source. People will start pushing towards renewable and demand that of their utility companies. As long as there's a way to integrate new energy capacity being generated into those systems, I think that's where a lot of the work and the evolution will come.
With solar and wind I worry about resiliency. When you're dependent on something natural that you can't control, and there is no mass process for storing energy, what happens in a scenario where there is no sunshine, or too much sunshine? How do you deal with that?
That's a really great question, and that's becoming an increasingly important question as time goes on. There's this race for storage capacity. How do you take renewables and store them? I think a lot more innovations will come out of that. In a country like Pakistan with very high solar radiation, it's not as much of an issue just because it's sunny all the time.
Does too much sun ever cause outages?
No. Our customer will be able to power the product for four hours during the day, and then they'll have, say 16 hours of power. There is a battery being used. There is a battery in the system. The batteries will have to get larger and larger and more and more efficient. It's not a problem to us right now, but that will be a problem for the whole industry moving forward.
A race in the tech to create storage.
Yes.
How affordable is solar?
We've got a solution that's a four watt solution that costs $35 a system. Somebody will pay a couple dollars a month for 18 months until they pay it off. Then there's a larger system that's a 12 watt, and costs $80. People will pay $9 a month until they pay that off. Then there's the one we sell the most, the 50 watt system, and that costs $100. Whatever configuration a person wants, we can supply them with that. Then like I said, we're going to be piloting a mini grid soon too.
What we really look to do is figure out what people are currently spending and then try something comparable in cost to, or less than, what they are already spending. A lot of the small business owners, for instance, don't usually use kerosene, they use diesel generators, but that diesel generator might cost $35 a month. We can offer them something for $28 a month, and as they're paying $28 dollars a month to us and paying off the product, the fuel source becomes free. Whereas a diesel generator you have to pay in perpetuity.
Are you looking also to integrate this idea into U.S. energy systems?
Probably not to be honest with you. There's 1.4 billion people globally who are completely off the grid, zero electricity. We will look more at markets similar to Pakistan. We're looking at Afghanistan next. I'm really interested in looking at overlooked markets, and for whatever reason, people are not interested in going into these countries, but there's definitely a demand. Bringing something as basic as electricity could be life changing.
We're not the only ones doing this. I would say globally there's about 15-20 entrepreneurs just like me who do this in frontier markets. I met colleagues that are working in the Philippines, all over east and west Africa, Vietnam. Any place there's a high density population and a huge off grid population is a good place for us to go to.
Energy access is a basic infrastructure people need to improve the quality of their life. Electricity is an underlying basic infrastructural need that needs to be in place before anything else can be delivered.
If somebody has to walk eight hours a day to go and collect fuel wood, they're contributing to deforestation, and that eight hours a day could be spent doing something more productive. As far as countries like the United States, what I see happening is that consumers have demands unlike the consumers of 20, 30, 50 years ago. People care about where their money is going, where their dollar is going, and they want to know that it's being used in a way that drives what their personal values are. Consumers will probably be demanding more and more clean energy, to be integrated into the traditional grid system. The technology to become grid independent if you're a person that wants to do that, is becoming available. So, that might happen too.
I wonder how we'll be able to participate in clean energy on a large scale in Western countries with our current grid.
It takes, on average in a developing country, nine years to have a grid line built out to you and hook you onto it. That's somebody's entire childhood. Being an environmentalist with my family originating in Pakistan, I was thinking, this is a country of 210 million people. It's about to be the fifth largest country in the world in terms of population, and the population's not slowing like it is in India or in China. How are we going to meet the demand of these new people? Two thirds of the population is under the age of 35. We need to figure out ways to meet the demand. They're going to continue to have growing energy needs.
How do you define energy democracy?
Democratization means giving people access to the basic infrastructure that's available to people in other parts of the country. If you extrapolate from that globally, developing countries are not able to contribute to their local or national economies, or to the world economy, because they don't have access to basic infrastructure, and that's why they're not able to break the cycle of poverty.
It has to be done. Now it’s just how are we going to do it, and how can we do it quickly, and can we think of new ways to do it? Why do we have to rely on antiquated ways of doing things now that we have new technology? It's an equalizer.
International development experts have figured out it's really important for developed countries to help developing countries have democratized energy, and for everybody in these countries to have access to basic infrastructure, like clean drinking water, electricity, healthcare, and education. It makes for a much more stable population.
Any time we speak with or work with the U.S. government, there is a clear recognition that if the United States wants to spend their money on security, outside of military aid, building basic infrastructure and making sure people have access to basic infrastructure, is good for security.
That's interesting.
We need people to have a chance at living within a certain standard. You don't know where the next major insight or breakthrough is going to come from. If people don't have a fighting chance to develop a thought or an idea, because they're so focused on meeting their basic needs, those innovations won't come to light. A rising tide lifts all boats.
If we can leverage technology to make energy access quickly and cheaply and efficiently, I think it's a win-win globally. It's definitely a priority globally. It's one of the sustainable development goals. It's Number 7 in the Universal Energy Act, so there is a recognition globally that this should be a priority, and it's just a matter of getting there.
There are a lot of us working on it, we'll get there eventually.