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
Michael Casey on Blockchain and The Grid
by Michael Casey
February 20, 2019
This interview with Michael Casey was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Michael Casey is a writer and researcher in the fields of economics, finance, and digital-currency technology. He is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Senior Advisor for the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT's Media Lab, where he explores blockchain applications that advance financial inclusion, economic development, and resource efficiency.
We look to define terms as we enter new themes, incorporating blockchain and what it represents within energy democracy would be especially helpful.
To start, how do you define energy democracy?
There's a spectrum of things that would encompass it. The one we've been most focused on, in terms of how it impacts blockchain, is the idea of the ability of the user, and therefore the pro-sumer [the person who is consuming and producing power], to have the right to sell and buy at a market determined price. As it is now, utility is in the middle, purchasing power at a rate they predetermine. There's no capacity to sell to an alternative, other than a single provider.
A world in which I can enter into agreements that have my power purchased at a particular rate, whether that is literally delivering the electrons, or is a contract in which my provision to the grid is compensated at a rate that is determined by the demand for that particular quality of power, is something we're really focused on.
Which is the way the current structure is. You build onto that notions of broader democracy. The right to go off-grid, the right to establish your own systems for setting smart meters, for determining what devices are used and when. There's something of a spectrum in the concept, but the starting point we care about most is price, at least that I do.
What about ownership?
That would fall into it for sure. Yes, we definitely would put that into that same spectrum. The idea that the assets can be owned by an individual. There’s varying degrees to this. One is ownership and the other one is finance. The ability for me to finance the acquisition with whomever I can tap, rather than the electricity infrastructure I depend upon, being itself dependent upon the financing vehicles of utility. That I, or my community, can tap external sources to fund what is essentially our contribution to the broader infrastructure. You can get broader and broader with it, but the right to own and control those assets would be part of it. The right to determine how and who finances it is another part.
Where does blockchain come in?
I'll speak to it from the projects I've been specifically involved in. One is a microgrid we are experimenting with in Puerto Rico. I look at it in two ways. First is this concept of finance. I can tap my home or community and establish a microgrid. How might we have that financed by some sort of external direct investor, a social impact investor or investment fund? The blockchain creates the capacity to form what are known as smart contracts.
Are you aware of that term?
No.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger. It, in a decentralized manner, without any particular entity in charge, records the sequence of transactions and then, through a consensus mechanism, every node, every computer, within that network, each maintain their own version of the ledger, and update that ledger through this consensus process.
If you think about how we might move to a world where my transactions, my sale of power, my provision of power, and the funds I receive for those, are not being dictated by centralized utility – then the idea that we’re now no longer going to have one entity in charge of those transactions, and who gets to set those prices and who doesn't, starts to move us into this direction of decentralization.
We might, as a community, decide we're going to nominate some party to be in charge of the ledger, but again you're now trusting that entity to do so. Maybe the community appoints one household to run the ledger, and they're billing everybody, they're acting essentially as a local utility. You really haven't changed the model that much, you've just made it smaller, but it's okay. That could be a more efficient way to do things. Once you bring an outside investor in who says, "I want to make sure my collateral, some claim on that power, and the income that's generated, is being managed in a way that I can trust. I'm external to the community. Who am I going to trust to do that?"
A distributed ledger that nobody can change, gives me the capacity, potentially – I always use the word potentially, because all of this stuff is completely and utterly, in experimental phase right now – it gives us the potential to have my transactions verified without me having to trust the community member that is in charge.
You can imagine a situation where there's an investor in the United States, let's say in Seattle, who has put a five-year bond into the financing of a local community's grid in Africa. He's going to want to have some assurances that asset is being managed in a way that is in the interest to what they paid for. This is one principle idea to think about. Decentralization gives us the capacity, not just for those inside the community, but also outside, to have a relationship like this.
A smart contract is the idea that in addition to managing transactions, in the plain vanilla notion of what that is, payments of money, the actions that are taken by software to instruct devices to do things, or manage a set of contracts, can be executed without any one computer being in charge.
A smart contract is a bit of a misnomer. It implies that the contract is what's going on. The contract is an agreement between you and I. A smart contract says that you and I enter into an agreement and neither you nor I have any power over the computers executing the terms and obligations of that contract, to manipulate it.
How does this work in terms of smart property? I've got collateral, even though I'm living in Seattle and the microgrid I’m financing is in Nairobi. If payments are not met, it's a form of foreclosure or default protection. I funded this thing at a low interest rate because I'm protected. If the payments are not being made, at a certain point the system recognizes this because those payments are digital, they have programmable money qualities, and they stop. A device – a smart meter, one of the devices within the system, can divert that power back to the grid for example, so that the user is no longer using it. You can create a pay-per-use type of structure.
We thought long and hard about this from a social impact, developing world scenario. Could you build tiers into it so that certain devices always stay on because they have to? The hospital needs to have its power. Various things need to stay on, but you could then have some sort of structure in which the least necessary, or least important devices, can be turned off. And that power is diverted back to the grid until the loan is renewed and payments are revived.
You're creating a certain amount of de facto property rights that is the structure of so many other forms of lending. That's the way we think we can drive down the cost of lending. Rather than having to depend upon very centralized public finance models, in which infrastructure is built with access to Wall Street's funding, we now have the capacity, potentially, because I don't need to trust anybody in terms of the execution.
In that structure we can potentially bypass all of that, and have pools of social impact investors have direct stakes in, and help to fund the development of these smaller off-grid or on-grid types of microgrids. That's what we're working on in Puerto Rico right now. That access to finance. How do we create a sufficient level of protection? There's always the capacity that somebody could monkey with the smart meter. There's various things that could go wrong, but any investment has these factors.
The other part of it is, if you have a true transactive grid, it's not just a two way transaction with me and utility. I'm actually trading with my neighbors and setting up transactions and relationships. Then potentially the blockchain could be there as a way to tokenize the rights of that electricity. The transaction is between each of the participants in that network which itself would also be managed in a decentralized way. There's no utility. There's no large national or state level utility, nor is there even a local community utility. The utility in a sense, is the blockchain. There has to be built into it some sort of price mechanism. People are only going to enter into deals if you can potentially program devices, inverters and like, to accept or divert power over their prices, and meet whatever parameters you've set.
All that functionality, do I transact, do I not? Has the transaction been recorded? So there's no way I could do a deal with one person and actually divert the power somewhere else, and essentially double dip on the thing. All of that needs to be managed to keep the system in balance. That is where we see the second layer of a decentralized blockchain to come.
I feel at this stage, after a long time looking at all this, unconvinced that transactive systems like this are necessarily going to work. I do believe that in some shape or form, if you're going to reach this true energy democracy idea, something like this is where we need to go. But we're not there now. I think that's partly because we have these big, sensitive, national grid structures and it's not clear that the power loads and various sensitivities that go with how you keep the grid alive, and not kill people, can be managed entirely by this sort of structure.
This is just my thinking at the moment. It's not as if the broad principle of a more decentralized way to manage transactions between users and the grid isn't something we should be striving for. I am a believer in the finance part of it. Transactive systems, certainly in on-grid environments, are going to have to be capable of interacting with the demands of large service operators needs.
What about working on microgrids, or moving off the grid? Do you think that creates a better opportunity at moving towards decentralization?
Harvey [Micahel] is actually more of a visionary when it comes to the broader idea of energy democracy. A lot of his thinking has helped me on this sort of stuff.
There's certainly potential in off-grid settings.
Can we have a hybrid? Where you have an off-grid community based microgrid? It's not plugged into the national grid, except at such times when it needs it. So the national grid becomes the back up. That would be ideal. There's a huge political move. You'd need to get these utilities to really step back into a different role. While the grid is functioning in it's off-grid strategy, that is the microgrid, if you wanted to manage transactions within that community in a decentralized way, the blockchain could step in and be that management protocol for that system.
It seems like the private sector and academic institutions are the ones leading this thinking. Do you think the public and the political follow private sector investments?
That's a really good question. I think there are two barriers at arriving at this broad image of energy democracy. The first is that incumbents have a lot of power. Public utilities are heavily regulated. We find this in banking as well.
The regulators are told they must regulate the grid in such and such a way, and that is defined by default, under this current centralized paradigm. You have a lot of inertia from regulators who don't want to disrupt the model because you'd obviously have to design completely different regulations for a world in which these decentralized microgrids are built along the lines I just described. That's one barrier.
Then of course, the utilities themselves have their own political clout. If we want to depend upon their infrastructure, all that expensive capital that’s been invested into it, so that their wires are the ones we use to transact amongst each other, how are we going to compensate those utilities? There's an interesting question about how we might do so. It could be that they cease to be the providers of the power, or at least the sole providers of the power, and instead are just service managers and they take a service fee. One way to think about it might be to think about how the US telecoms industry was deregulated in the middle of the '90's. The baby bells were broken up and the like, there was a mandate that the pipes had to be provided to all comers, there would be a fee that would be paid, but there was no way you could prevent, as the owner of those cables, other providers from providing services along that infrastructure. That's one model that might be interesting when you think about it. But those guys, nonetheless, because the way their current profit models are built, and because of their political clout, are a barrier.
It’s probably at this stage, too marginal. There's not a big enough change in my savings or my profits as a pro-sumer, to really exist. It just hasn't got that "gee whiz", great motivator behind it. I think that's essentially the problem with lots of business models. It's just too incremental. How do you make this big shift if there are a lot of inconveniences involved? On the other hand, I think there is something wrong with that to some extent. We're not thinking hard about how, if we do decentralize, there's all these other business models and ideas that can be built on top of a more decentralized energy democracy system. Rather than thinking about the savings or profits, that I as a household pro-sumer may or may not make on my existing usage and sale of electricity, how do we incentivize bill systems? We now have all this information generated around price levels and the use of IOT devices, and we get more and more sophisticated, down to the device level – there is a way to actually build all these other services in the community. You treat the excess electricity that's produced as a way to then produce batteries. There's a way to fuel electric vehicles that run bus routes around the system, and those buses end up being almost like a back up battery component to the system. You end up running a much, much cheaper traffic system because there's a dual purpose here. You're the backup, you're the recipient of the excess power, and you're providing a service.
How does that get baked into a model that makes the provision of those services cheaper and regulated through this decentralized price signaling mechanism that is a combination of IOT and blockchain, that renewable decentralized energy systems could provide? I don't know what that looks like, but I can envision some very smart, econometric design systems that bring in smart IOT devices that turn on here, turn off there, and create a really rich pool of data around optimizing power, and where and when. There's a whole lot of benefits that could be derived, in a future model that we're not yet visiting, beyond the pros and cons of using it under our current structure.
The problem is people just can't think beyond their monthly power bill. To do that, you need communities to be really forward thinking and experimental in what they could build in the future.
Utility is massive and ubiquitous, but still weirdly opaque, which leaves most people confused. I never think about my utilities bill. Where does trust come into play? Especially with blockchain. Does the public have a distrust in blockchain?
If designed appropriately, and if we reach the point where software and the models and protocalls that are being developed and constantly refined and proved, are trusted to the extent they should be, then they're actually a trust replacement system. That's exactly what they're supposed to be.
When I was talking about how a social impact investor in Seattle can feel confident that their interests are being protected in a smart property financing structure with a microgrid somewhere else, the question of trust is key. I can't trust the local village chief to act in my interest. We just cannot. We have all these barriers to trust around our economy built on those things. Just as there's no reason why the villagers should trust that if I had control over the devices, I wouldn't manipulate and divert the power to my own interests.
It is precisely the problem of trust you're trying to resolve through a blockchain solution. But you asked the right question because we're not yet there in terms of the public perception of blockchain. I personally feel there's a host of misplaced narratives and a deep level of misunderstanding. Some of which is promoted by vested interests who don't understand what's going on.
There's also a lot of really shady, funky people working in this space that have done some bad things. And they've been able to do bad things because the technology itself isn't advanced enough to be able to give the right level of protection. The good news is there is a lot of work being done on security and improving the system so that we're going to reach this level where a) the confidence that people can have that they won't loose their phones is higher and b) they can do so in a way that they don't actually have to trust a custodian. Because right now in a blockchain, bitcoin type solution, the broader ecosystem around it is still being serviced by entities who have control over your money. It's a bit of a hybrid that's not necessarily reliable.
Systems that have a more decentralized, but also highly reliable security model are coming, and that is going to hopefully bring people around to start placing better confidence and trust in the system itself.
If you just look at the way Puerto Rico’s public utility was run, and the abuse, it's hard to say I should trust that. Wait until you see PREPA and what's happened there. There's no trust in the system. One of the reasons why I think Puerto Rico looks like a really good opportunity for us to explore this is because there's such a breakdown of trust in the publicly run system. They're looking for alternatives and we're able to dive in and explore ways we can make it fairer for everybody.