interviews
The Uniqueness of Electrification in The United States
by Gretchen Bakke
September 10, 2021
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid, and visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin. , Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by franknews. This interview was originally published in February 2019.
frank: I have your book here, it's such a great framing piece that simplifies something so complicated.
GB: Incredibly complicated.
I would love to talk about energy democracy. How people want to move forward, and what sort of policy needs to be in place.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
One thing that's remarkable about systems everywhere, is that there's some sort of universal electrification. Just the idea. That idea seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look for example, at Lagos in Nigeria, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. Even poor people means middle-class people, right? There's still a grid there, but it's like two or three generators, a bunch of cables, and it runs for one building or maybe two buildings. It uses heavy fuel oil, usually diesel, so it's a much more polluting thing.
The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve.
I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped, overhauled, or given a new shape at the lowest levels, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, with no interruption whatsoever, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – it might be that I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military. But give an inch and they take a mile. You don't want that to happen. I think that's one question. I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electricity systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced, while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down. But also has the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect. It's hard to manage, and it's hard to figure out how to pay for the grid if you do that, because you still have exactly the same giant infrastructure, but the way you make money off of it is removed.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an orchestrator. What we need is an orchestrator to make all of this complexity work together. It was still this idea that it would be a person. What I’ve found in the three years since, is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess. I always imagine a real button on the wall, but this will be on your phone.
Then if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, but you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where we lose democracy, actually, and we lose equity. Even though there's some sort of dead reckoning sense of where we want to get to.
We tend to think of renewable energy as good, but eventually those companies will accumulate the same amount of wealth and power as coal or oil. The question becomes, like you said, what are the challenges and how do you move forward?
And how does democracy need to be reformed? Because if you think of it as kind of old school democratic, then a house can be an entity that can vote somehow forward into a management structure, which then represents it up. Along the way, you can do that with little company forms. Like I have my own little electricity company, and this is how much I make. My block is represented by this other kind of electricity company, and that goes up. It's not rocket science, we know how to do democracy in that way.
The question is, does democracy in that way work? Does it only produce a trickle up of funds and a trickle down of responsibility and risk?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The premise is, and the fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but the bigger system, you can't just build a parallel system next to it. It's too expensive to do that.
The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it.
There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it. The expertise and the technology has the same structure. If we have 80% solar feeding into this grid, here's what happens when a cloud goes over at the level of five seconds. Now, this is a giant problem, and there's electrical engineers working on figuring out how to make the grid function in this case. There's a push behind the expert. At the expertise level, people are interested actually, in the larger infrastructure. And nobody else knows enough to get around it. It might just be like inertia when you sit there. One thing that I really have seen is that the way in which reforms are happening in the western part of the US, and the way that they're happening in the northeast are quite different. There are different logics at work that might actually, in 100 years, if we're still here, and not completely roasted to death, produce two systems with fairly different underlying structures.
What is the difference?
The west is inter-regional cooperation. The west is really like, how do you deal with the fact that you have hydro in the Pacific Northwest, and you have wind in the Dakotas, and you have all this solar on the south. It turns into this regional balancing of renewables that then depends a lot on people being able to take themselves off the grid in order to manage that in a reasonable way, but it's huge. That's why you have all these fights in California saying, we don't want to import any coal power from Idaho, and Idaho is saying, "We don't want to be part of this thing. You're going to force all of your renewables on us." The reason those fights are happening is because what's developing is, in fact, a very large regional balanced, renewable system.
What's happening in the northeast, because it's so much denser is, micro grids that can island themselves, but for the most part are interoperable. It's a very different shape. It's like a foam in the northeast, all these little bubbles that are stuck together. If this will happen, we'll see, but that seems to be the direction it's going. Whereas there's very few little bubbles developing in the west. What happens in the south is up for grabs.
Is one better than the other?
The grid is always about geography. It's always a local system. What you have available to you geographically determines what you're capable of doing. You can have pumped air storage in Alabama or Mississippi. The way in which the weather affects the grid is interesting. During Hurricane Harvey, one of the things they learned was that the solar panels stay on the house if the roof stays on the house. Really the weaker link is not how a solar panel connects, it's how the roof is connected to the building. These are things that in the West Coast, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest, are just not problems. The storms aren't that ferocious, but on the East Coast they are. There needs to be a reaction to that, that provides the resilience they all like to talk about. What they also found after Sandy, is that communities that had one house on a block that had electricity came back much more quickly. They had a sense of cohesion, of social cohesion, of neighborliness, and there was less sense of trauma, things will rebuild quickly, and everything worked better. In that in that case, you want to be able to have a micro-grid even if it's at the level of the home.
The idea of being islandable seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building, and people were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor in that skyscraper were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
Problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There's a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant, didn't understand what it was as a system. Those interventions were people putting solar on the roof, and then they're super mad that when their house blacked out. I know a lot of people who have bought diesel generators instead because during a blackout you get to have power.
It was also just this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else that has been so damaging to the system. There were a lot of interventions happening in the grid, and I just thought well, we need a primer. That's a super practical side of it.
The other side was this desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.”
But the uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
There are pockets that are not that way for historical reasons, and ideological reasons. The fact that the business community has been so interested in the book, I think it's been really good, I hope. I hope it's really good. Those were the two pieces. It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
Not to glorify China because it does not need to be glorified at this moment, but I did see one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not about just money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison has been upgrading their system, and the way in which PG&E was not upgrading their system. At this very basic level of how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has, and I would say at this point, it might be interesting to talk to Southern California Edison. Because there should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same. With the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, this grid. I embrace this, the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us, and if I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
It's not like this Occupy Wall Street movement of electricity independence, we'll just destroy the entire country. One spark at a time. Even the companies do it wrong, and they're well trained people. I think there's a place for expertise in the future. If you want universal electrification, there's a place for expertise in there.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but the reason I say it has to happen at the level of policy, is that as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change. I don't know if you've seen this yet, but you should, you will – you stop seeing a house with like two solar panels on the roof. Every single rooftop should have solar. Where you're moving away from private decisions about household electricity use being mimicked in the infrastructure into a larger, statewide decision. For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there's laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think law saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? I find that interesting, in a good way. Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly.
Without global warming, we will be doing this anyway. The question is if we need legislation to make it happen, because we need it to happen faster.
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There's a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier than thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that? I feel like there are people who have believed that climate change is happening for a while, and now what they really want is action, and that group is growing every single day. People are just like, "Could somebody do something, please? Someone."
Anything.
Anything. Anything will be fine. I believe that each of those anythings, if they can be done, then opens up a whole new world of possibility. I can say, "Yes, we just need to get rid of fossil fuels, no extraction, no sale, no trade, no use." You can say that. I would be fine with just, we're going to stop having cars with engines in them.
Yeah.
I mean France said that. France is all nuclear, so they can. I guess it's still kind of how do we knock down a giant fireball, and while, by the way, we're doing that, try to make the world a little more equitable. The number one thing I would say needs to happen at the small level is that people with rooftop solar or small wind, need to be able to keep their lights on. That just has to happen.
How does that happen?
Essentially the problem is that if there's any electricity feeding into the system, when the men working on the system try to bring it back up, they get electrocuted. There just needs to be a switch, essentially, that automatically takes anything generating electricity off the system. There are places where this is being discussed more seriously, but if you have a diesel generator that already happens. You can do it with solar.
You can do it...
Yeah. To run a microgrid with solar power is more complicated technologically than with a diesel generator. With diesel, you actually have to go turn it on, and in that act of turning it on, you make a signal that says this house is an island. But with solar, it just stays on, there isn't any break. There would have to be some sort of artificial break put in, like maybe your power goes out for 45 seconds and then comes back on again. I don't know how it would work, but I could tell you that it's not so complicated.
It's a legislative problem, and it's a systems engineering problem, but it's not a technological problem.
I think the argument that everybody starts with is the good one, which is that electricity is everything – it's money, it's information, it's family, and some ways it's communication. It's the sense of how you're connected to the world. Just the idea of a blackout is a ridiculous misnomer, because the lights are not what matters anymore. If the electricity goes out you don't have running water anymore in your house. It's become this completely essential substructure of everything that we are and do.
Of course we should be interested in it.
We can't remove it anymore.
interviews
From Pew to Poll
by Matthew Soerens
April 1, 2020
This interview with Matthew Soerens, the US Director of Church Mobilization for World Relief, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank | Will you tell me about the work you do?
MS | I work for an organization called World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization started in the 1940s. We work in about a dozen countries around the world. Since the 1970s, we’ve also been one of the organizations that partners with the US State Department to resettle refugees. We were founded, and still are a subsidiary of, the National Association of Evangelicals.
In the US context, we’ve particularly focused on serving refugees and other immigrants.
My role is focused on helping churches and other Christian institutions think through issues of immigration through a Christian theological perspective, that's also informed by an understanding of how immigration law and policy work. I am also the national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table, which helps to lead with a bunch of larger national evangelical Christian entities, denominations and other networks.
How has your day to day work changed since Coronavirus?
I think the biggest thing that has changed is that it almost feels a bit tone deaf to reach out to a church and say, “Hey, you want to have a biblical conversation about immigration?” It doesn't relate back to the experience we're all living in the very immediate term. It seems a bit off to most people.
But, there are a lot of people who we would have categorized as vulnerable before this crisis hit, who are probably more vulnerable now. Either because of the economic dynamics or vulnerability to the virus itself. A lot of my work in the last two weeks has been trying to focus on how we call our constituencies of churches and individual Christians – as they take care of themselves and their families, which of course we want to encourage them to do – to not forget that there are people who are even more vulnerable in this context than most of us are. How do we focus there?
Are you looking at health conditions in detention centers holding detained immigrants?
Anyone who can't practice social distancing should be an area of concern. There are a number of those groups; those who sleep at homeless shelters, someone who is incarcerated. But where that most directly affects our work, is people who are in immigrant detention facilities, which look a lot like incarceration.
Most people there have not committed criminal offenses; it's people who have pending civil immigration proceedings in front of them, whether that's an asylum hearing or they've been living unlawfully in the country for 20 years and they're now facing deportation, which might be because they committed a crime and that brought them to the attention of ICE. Often, it's not related to any criminal activity at all. Those individuals are people we've been particularly concerned about, especially to the extent that some of them are older or have underlying health conditions.
What are you recommending detention centers do?
The most obvious thing to do would be to start with those who don't have criminal convictions. In a vast majority of cases there is no reason to think that there is a public safety threat. I'm not saying release them if there is a threat to public safety. But in the vast majority of cases, that's not the case.
It's people who only have civil violations. If they have a criminal violation, the most common charge is unlawful entry. It’s not a violent offense, it is related to their immigration status. Or those who got picked up for minor traffic violations, even a DUI – I'm not condoning driving under the influence of alcohol, but we wouldn't give someone the death penalty for that. And that’s what we are looking at if someone has an underlying health condition. I would argue that the Department of Homeland Security should be paroling those people out.
How do you get DHS to do that? What needs to happen?
They have the authority to do that immediately.
To be fair, I think they are doing so in some cases. Even in the last 24 hours, I've heard of people who've been detained for quite a long time being released. I'm hoping they are coming to that conclusion, or that some of the advocacy is having that effect. But I don't know yet if that's happening across the board, or if this is a more of a localized decision that's happening in a few places.
You also focus on the undocumented population. How do our current circumstances affect them?
That's certainly an area with a population of unique vulnerability. They're uniquely vulnerable before this happens, which means they're going to be uniquely vulnerable in the midst of this crisis. Undocumented immigrants are more likely to lack insurance, which might make them less likely to go get tested and get treatment. Where we've particularly seen undocumented immigrants affected is more in terms of economics because they tend to be disproportionately at the front lines of some of the industries that are most affected in the short term, like restaurants.
I pulled stats from the Pew Research Center that found that 10% of food preparation and serviceworkers are undocumented. In my neighborhood, I can tell you it's a lot higher than that. Maybe that's true at a national level, or maybe it's hard to get good data on people who don't like to answer surveys, like from employers who are violating the law by hiring them. But where I live most restaurants have at least kitchen staff who are mostly immigrants, and a significant share of them are undocumented. Those people are almost all out of work or down to minimal hours. When you are paid on an hourly basis, and you went from working 60 hours a week to working 10 hours a week, you suddenly don't know how to pay rent. I know people who are affected by that directly and it's happening all over the country.
Do you anticipate any federal action putting cash in undocumented workers hands?
Do I anticipate it? Honestly, no. Do I think it would be morally appropriate? Yes.
If somebody is getting paid under the table, I have no idea how, logistically, that could get sorted out. But for people who filed their taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Notification Number, which is this special number that the Internal Revenue Service created decades ago, whether it was originally its purpose or not, it is now basically how undocumented people file their taxes. This is something that most Americans do not know exists; people do not realize we have this alternate way to file your taxes if you are ineligible for a social security number. But we do have that system and there's four and half a million people who filed their taxes in the last year that we have data for, using those numbers.
There are probably 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, many of which are children who probably do not work. So likely, the majority of undocumentted people working are filing their taxes with those ITINS. It would be very easy to give them the same sort of stimulus check that recently passed. I am expecting myself to receive that check. That's really nice. We'll use that, or share it with a family in need. But I know people who could use it a lot more right now. From an economic standpoint, if you want to keep money moving through the economy, you give those stimulus checks to people who are going to spend it the day they get it, instead of people who might save it, or think about their children’s college education for the future. And undocumented folks are usually in that first category.
I should make clear, some of them are also working 60 hours a week right now at grocery stores or in hospitals. They're also on the front lines of the people who are considered essential, and frankly, are at more risk than most other people. In the grocery store I shop at, there's no toilet paper and there's no canned foods, but somehow there is still produce, which means somebody is still picking produce in the fields in California. The vast majority of those people are immigrants, and the majority of those immigrants are undocumented.
Do you see the supply chain being affected at all?
At this point it doesn't seem to be affected. I don’t know agriculture work well enough, but I've seen people working and sometimes they are working closely together. It seems possible to me that could be a place where the disease starts to spread. It tends to be a younger workforce, which could mean that a lot of people get it and not ever have symptoms, which is a whole other problem for the spread. I certainly worry that that could happen and affect the workforce, then maybe Americans would appreciate how important those immigrant workers are.
But for the time being, they're still working and it’s not just undocumented immigrants, but also resettled refugees. A ton of those folks work in food processing. Not picking the crops but putting them in packages and refrigerated warehouses. Those are essential jobs. Those don't pause when a lot of other jobs pause.
Do you think the pandemic will be politicized to push border conversations?
Yeah, I mean, I would be naive having lived through the last several years to not presume that would be the case.
And how do you see that playing out?
Some of the narrative will be: this is a foreign disease and foreign people brought it and we have to watch out for foreigners.
It has already been part of the narrative with people calling this the “Chinese Virus.” Somebody asked me about that and my response was, well do we talk about the Zoom meetings we're all doing as Chinese? Zoom was founded by a Chinese immigrant. Do we talk about the doctor saving people's lives as that Chinese doctor?
We don't usually refer to people based on their places of origin. And if we're doing so only in response to the virus, that's a pretty good clue that we are not being very even handed. As far as we can tell this originated in China, but that doesn't have anything to do with many, many Chinese Americans or other Asian Americans who are being maligned right now as a result of those origins.
I would also say, there are decisions that have been made around, for example, shutting down refugee resettlement or closing borders, which I think might be prudent in terms of a public health response. I worry that pretext might be used to keep borders closed for longer than is medically necessary. And from people who have been trying to restrict refugee resettlement for a long time.
You occupy a pointedly contentious space between the evangelical church and immigration. A recent article in the New York Times connected evangelicals and the political response to Coronavirus.
I read that piece. It basically highlighted a few anecdotal cases of evangelicals who are anti-science and doing things like holding large church services in defiance of science-driven requests to practice social distancing. But the reality is the vast, vast majority of churches have cancelled their Sunday services or moved their services online. To be honest, this sort of piece – which I realize is perhaps all some New York Times readers know about evangelicals – is not that far from President Trump’s infamous claim that Mexican immigrants are bringing drugs and crime and are rapist… “and some,” he assumes, “are good people.” This piece had a similar statement, after highlighting several negative examples: “Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course,” but the author doesn’t bother to mention any such pastors by name, nor that they represent the vast majority of churches, nor that many prominent evangelicals like Rick Warren have called it “dumb” and “unbiblical” to continue to hold in-person gatherings.
Whether it’s a Republican presidential candidate talking about Mexican immigrants or a liberal opinion writer focused on evangelicals, it’s usually a bad idea to highlight the worst examples of any group of people without acknowledging how exceptional they are.
When it comes to media coverage of evangelical views on immigration, the real story is more nuanced than is typically assumed. The majority of white evangelicals were opposed to the family separation policy that the Trump administration put into place a few years ago, but the majority of white evangelicals also support a wall. Depending on which poll you look at, most white evangelicals are supportive of Dreamers getting legal status. Yet they're also the religious demographic most likely to say that immigrants present a threat to our customs and values. It's not quite as simple as evangelicals hate immigrants or love immigrants.
My job is to say, actually, I don't care what the polls say on this. If we're evangelicals, our views should be driven by the scriptures. So let's look at what the Bible says.
And the Bible, it turns out, is a very pro-immigrant book, with some nuance as well. There are passages about respecting governing authorities. I'm not condoning any violation of law or saying that doesn't matter. But we think immigration has actually been very good for the United States. It's been very good for the church in the United States. First or second generation immigrants are a very significant part of growth in evangelicalism in the United States. Biblically, we're commanded to welcome the stranger, to quote Jesus's words in Matthew 25, and to love our neighbors. And it's hard to read Jesus's parable of the good Samaritan and not conclude that your neighbor might be someone who is ethnically or even religiously different than you.
Do you find yourself in biblical debates with other evangelicals about immigration?
I would say what is far more common is debates that are not about the Bible at all. I'll come into a conversation with all these Bible verses and they'll say, but they broke the law, but they're criminals, but they're terrorists.
Then we can just point to the facts. Yes, some people committed crimes, but let's look at overall crime rates. Immigrants, whether lawfully present or not, commit crimes at lower rates than native born us citizens, and there is good data on that.
Evangelical churches have largely failed to disciple, which is a Christian word for teach, people in their congregations to think about this topic from a Christian theological perspective. We know that both anecdotally and from surveys where self-described evangelical Christians, say they've never heard about this topic in church. They get silence on the issue, and then they're watching cable news and reading things on the internet.
Right. Have you come to understand the driving motivation for white, American evangelicals, to be the loudest in the room in conservative politics and media?
To me it's a cyclical chicken or the egg problem. The problem is people haven't heard about this. They haven't heard a Christian perspective on immigration rooted in the Bible from their local churches. They haven't heard that perspective because their pastors are either uncomfortable, afraid, or feel ill equipped to address the issue. Part of that is, it's a complicated issue for anyone, very few people in this country actually understand US immigration law. But it's also fear.
If our struggling church, which is already facing some downward economic pressures, loses tithers then we can't sustain our ministry. So the easiest thing to do is just not address this at all. My challenge to those pastors, who I sympathize with very genuinely, is that this issue is too fundamental to the core of who Jesus calls us to be as his followers for us to ignore.
Our work has been effective amongst people who are deeply theologically grounded evangelical Christians. Where we've really not been sure how to engage is this category of nominal evangelicals, who don’t actually go to church. You're not going to reach them by getting pastors to talk about this topic, unless it's Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday, because they don't actually go to church except for on holidays.
People who self-identify in the polls as evangelical, but who aren’t actually affiliated with an evangelical church and don’t actually have distinctly evangelical theological beliefs, are the biggest challenge for us. I mean if you look at the most anti-immigrant voices among prominent evangelicals – and there aren't very many of them – generally don't have institutional affiliations to think about. The ones that represent institutions such as denominations are usually either totally silent on this topic or actually quite supportive. And part of that is they don't represent “white evangelicals.” They represent a whole constituency, many of whom are not white. In many denominations, a quarter of their congregations are immigrants or their children, who are interacting with immigration issues in real time.
USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] is closed at the moment. There's a pause on asylum courts and hearings. Do you think that has a positive or negative effect upon reopening?
I don't know. I wake up at night thinking about that. There are political forces in the United States that have been very clear about trying to, for example, shut down refugee resettlements, and have largely done so. There have been efforts to not abide by the terms of the trafficking victims protection reauthorization act, which governs how our government deals with unaccompanied children apprehended at the border.
The government is taking the position that these things need to be put on hold right now for public health reasons. There's a good chance that some of these are reasonable decisions, given the very unique global public health crisis we’re facing. I wish I could trust it was solely out of public health concerns, and that our country will go back to abiding by what I believe is an appropriate law as soon as medically appropriate. Obviously we haven't even hit the peak of this crisis medically. But I hope that we resume processing entries into the refugee resettlement program as soon as would be appropriate from a science based perspective.
I'm not gonna say the US should never restrict travel. El Salvador has restricted US citizens from traveling to its country. And that makes a lot of sense. If I was El Salvador, I'd do the same thing right now. I've spent time in Central America and I know that they do not have the hospital infrastructure to deal with the disease on a scale such as it is hitting New York City right now, or China, or Italy.
So I think it may make sense in this very unique moment to restrict some travel and I think it would be fair for that to go both ways if there are legitimate concerns.