Author: Charlie Roth (Page 2 of 2)

While I have spent so long reading about how technology is making life miserable for migrants – I’ll get to the ISD report later – it was heartening this week to read how technology is helping them.

RUTH was fascinating to learn about. An algorithm that can help match migrants with sponsors is a great feat. I’m also interested in learning more about “Annie MOORE” and matching migrants with employers. It seems that hopefully this system could be applied to migrants from other countries. Perhaps could this help ease the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border? The systems discussed and those two articles certainly seem more effective and efficient than what we’ve read about in the past few weeks concerning those border crossings.

I greatly enjoyed reading the articles where I read/heard directly from journalists (like you!) covering the war. My favorite thing we read all week was from Lindsey Hilsum:

“We stayed at the Menorah Hotel in the Jewish Centre. As Putin claimed to be ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine, we thought it would be a bit of an own goal if it was hit by a rocket. They also served very good cheesecake.”

I like the bits of humor dispersed throughout this piece, like that quote or people making comments (not compliments) about her age and appearance. It adds humanity in the stories covering this inhumane war. I also appreciated the context given in the BBC piece, especially the stories from Russians that gave perspective to the kinds of sentiments they grew up with (e.g. “A chicken’s not really a bird; and Poland’s not really abroad,” or that Prague is “ours”). It was interesting to hear about how the misinformation had spread to them as children.

Speaking of misinformation (segway!), I really appreciated the ISD study – for my thesis purposes, not for the world. The fact that TikTok actively promotes those search terms, even the misspellings of phrases they block, is appalling.

I spoke with a fact-checker at PolitiFact who works with TikTok (as well as Meta) to fact-check their content (see my article from this week), and he told me that PolitiFact’s work can result in the post’s downgrade in the algorithm, but not necessarily being taken off. That doesn’t, though, explain why violent rhetoric was allowed to stay on according to the ISD. Additionally, the “invading army of sleeper cells” conspiracy theories and personal information of migrants should be taken down and posters punished.

The demonization and misinformation spread on social media platforms is evident from this study – and we’ve seen how it’s not the same level for Ukrainian refugees. It might be interesting to study different sets of migrants and see the differences in misinformation spread about them. In any case, it’s all bad, and I hope that there is a way to broaden the digital programs that allow the Ukrainians to escape the violence in their land to other migrants fleeing violence in their land.

When former President Trump stood on the debate stage and spread the baseless claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets, Springfield Pastor Carl Ruby was in disbelief.

“My heart sank. I knew what was going to happen,” he told me.

What Ruby foresaw came true. After Trump’s September 10 debate comment came a deluge of bomb threats to local schools and businesses, as well as hate groups such as the Proud Boys descending onto the streets of Springfield. Migrants – who entered the country and settled in Springfield legally – feared for their lives as a direct result of the misinformation. Ruby, who is a senior pastor at Central Christian Church in Springfield and a long-time advocate for the town’s migrants, called it “complete chaos.”

“I told people my worst fear is that he mentions it at the debate. And he did. And from then on, it just took off,” Ruby said.

During the debate, Trump said, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” The false claim that Trump made was parroted from his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who posted on X the previous day:

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

The next morning, the morning of the debate, Vance posted again on X, admitted that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But he still encouraged his followers to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

He later defended himself on CNN, saying, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

PolitiFact fact checker Louis Jacobson says that immigration has been a highly-misinformed-about topic “since Trump came down that golden escalator” in 2015. But since the debate comment, the topic has “become a piece of centrality of misinformation in the campaign.” He says that PolitiFact has had to hire multiple fact-checkers that specialize in immigration since 2015, and a PolitiFact analysis of Trump’s lies shows that he the policy area he lies about the most is immigration.

The newest claims have been repeatedly debunked by journalists – including those at PolitiFact – in addition to the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio. The Springfield woman behind an early Facebook post that claimed her neighbor’s cat might have been kidnapped and eaten by Haitian neighbors apologized to NBC News, saying, “It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen.” Another Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, had filed a much-spread police report about Haitian neighbors stealing her cat – but when the Wall Street Journal talked to her, she said she found her cat, Miss Sassy, in her basement a few days later.

But the recantations and fact-checks didn’t matter. National figures from Senator Ted Cruz to Elon Musk listened to Vance and posted the false claims on social media, where it spread like wildfire. Posts about Springfield ranged from threats to AI images of Trump “saving” a duck and cat in a pond, with the caption, “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!” – posted to X by the Republican House Judiciary Committee, an official government account.

While talking about misinformation, Jacobson quotes satirist Jonathan Swift: “Lies spread around the world while the truth gets its pants on.” He says that even though PolitiFact fact-checks claims like the Springfield story when it was still a social media post, that doesn’t stop it from going viral. This process is possible through an agreements with Meta and TikTok: when the social media company flags a post to PolitiFact, they research and fact-check the post, which is then downgraded in the algorithm and has a fact-check alert. Still, Jacobson says this is a flawed system that reflects Swift’s quote.

“It takes us time to get the fact check. Before we can finish, it’s already spread virally,” Jacobson said. “It’s not instantaneous. It takes time, there’s not much you can do about that.”

For the migrants and their advocates like Ruby, the misinformation and the fallout has them living on edge.

“I think there were a total of somewhere between 30 and 50 bomb threats,” Ruby said. “Schools canceled, hospitals closed, grocery stores closed. … Everyone was nervous. People are afraid. My family is very afraid. Some people have been afraid to come to church because of the publicity that I have had as a spokesman for the Haitians.”

The day after the debate, one anonymous Springfield Haitian migrant told The Haitian Times, “She [my niece] was scared [to go to school], but I told her to go, that God would protect.”

Another told The Haitian Times, “I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me. I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”

Ruby himself has been a target for hate and misinformation.

“I was accused of trafficking Haitians into town. I was accused of owning rental properties and making money off of them, all sorts of just bizarre, totally false things that just took off on social media,”  Ruby said. “I would get threats online saying Carl Ruby is a piece of sh*t who needs to be run out of town, or Carl Ruby is a coyote. I’m just not looking at their social media because it’s not really helpful for me to see.”

Still, Ruby says that with all of the hate, there has also been an outpouring of support from within Springfield and across the world.

“People have really rallied to [the migrants’] defense and people are welcoming them, telling them that they’re glad that they’re here,” Ruby recounted. “I expected lots and lots of angry phone calls and angry messages, and there have been a couple. But for every negative one, there’s been 100 positive ones.”

I sat in a silent room full of people doing homework, and said out loud, “oh my God, I love this graphic.”

Being a data journalist, I can’t help it when I see a graphic that so elegantly presents information like the migrant movement graphic in the New York Times’s “Bus by Bus” piece. It is such a great illustration of the movement of migrants and why the influx of people is such an issue – the different-colored dots literally bleed into each other. Put together with the rest of the readings, it shows how flooded the system is. I also appreciated the graphs in the Wall Street Journal article about the economic impact of the migrants.

In my opinion, the bussing situation is a (somewhat) shocking display of interstate rivalries and bitterness. We are supposed to be a united country, with states that help each other. What Gov. Abbott did was make his problem other states’ and city’s problems – states and cities that he disagrees with politically. There are much better and safer ways of dealing with the migrant crisis rather than reportedly tricking migrants to get on a bus and ship them to huge cities (that already have homeless crises). And the Wired article about people livestreaming “hunting” migrants is equally troubling – especially the quote from one of the men saying, “I say we shoot ’em all.”

The timeline of how New York City has handled the migrant crisis was also useful in laying out the crisis the city is facing. I’m more surprised that Governor Hochul didn’t step in sooner – especially to help spread out the migrants to different New York counties. And I’m always disappointed when counties fight against being humane and taking some of the burden. The pieces about New York reminded me of an article I read from The Atlantic about how, while the homeless shelters are full, many luxury apartments are vacant; and another more recent from Bloomberg about how more office buildings are vacant with the rise in working from home. I found the discrepancy fascinating.

The story of the Ukrainian refugees is a somewhat hopeful one, but I couldn’t help but wonder why their situation was so different from the migrants from Central and South America. Then Camilo answered it for me: geopolitics and policy – and potentially race. That reminded me of a story I worked on at CBS News: a migrant child died after being denied medical care in a Texas migrant camp. This isn’t necessarily a story about bussing, but it is about the failure of the system – the girl died after a week in the camp, but migrants are supposed to be processed and let out within 72 hours – and the parents told CBS that they suspected racial profiling due to their darker skin. Another interesting statistic that I found: according to a University of Texas/Texas Political Project poll in April 2022, 60 percent of Texans believed that Texas should take in Ukrainian refugees while 22 percent say they should not. The same poll found that 46 percent of Texans believe the state should take in hispanic refugees while 40 percent say they should not.

When walking past the construction site that will be Hobson College, Allison Jiang passes a sign along the fences: “Princeton Builds Access. Access Builds Serendipitous Collisions.” The wording has become somewhat of a joke among Princeton students – two years ago, every senior member of the Tower eating club used the phrase “serendipitous collisions” in their thesis.

But for Allison, the meaning rings true.

“I like to stick with that idea [of serendipitous collisions], because I feel like a lot of the friendships and connections you make here, they just kind of happen, you happen to be in the right place with the right people,” she told The Roth Report.

In fact, she says she has made most of her friends at Princeton through random, chance encounters.

“When I first got here, I had the mentality of ‘I’ll meet people through classes and clubs,’” she said. “But strangely, I found that most of the people that I talked to have kind of just been random and in passing.”

That hasn’t always been true for Allison, though. She was raised in downtown Chicago before moving to Shanghai with her family at eight years old. She went to a British International School before going to a boarding school in Massachusetts, the Groton School, for high school. Though she says that she made lifelong connections at Groton, Allison says that with about 80 people in her grade, there weren’t enough people to have those chance encounters.

“[The social environment was] almost like everybody knows somebody, or there are a lot of students who like their parents or teachers at the school,” she told the Report. “So I felt like everybody was very interlocked.”

But Princeton is large enough to foster those chance encounters that turn into lifelong friendships. And most of those have to do with a shared love of music. Allison has played violin since she was four years old, and she sings as well. She is part of multiple music groups on campus, including the chamber music group OPUS, the a capella group Shere Khan, and her own band, Pocketbook.

In fact, Pocketbook – made of Allison, keys player Simon Marotte, and drummer Ryder Walsh – started because of a serendipitous collision.

“I was in a freshman seminar with [Simon], and we had randomly jammed out once in NCW common room too but reconnected during a music class,” Allison said. “[I] started singing with them and it stuck!”

Simon agrees that it was serendipity that brought the band together.

“That encounter at the piano was pretty serendipitous. We both loved this song called ‘Best Part’ by Daniel Caesar. I’ve always loved playing on piano, and she sang it really well. And I think that was really serendipitous and like a motivating factor for me in wanting to work with her. But also, I feel like it’s kind of in the spirit of jazz to like the spontaneity of that.”

Pocketbook is slated to be the in-house band for Princeton’s late-night show, All-Nighter, this year, which the band is especially excited about. They perform original songs, covers, and improvised songs.

Another one of her serendipitous friends, Sophie Zhang, says seeing Pocketbook perform is one of her favorite memories of Allison.

“I remember, me and my friend were there listening to the song, and our jaws both just dropped because it was so unexpectedly amazing,” she told the Report.

Sophie and Allison knew each other tangentially from OPUS, but became close through a series of what Allison says are random events.

“We overlapped because one of their friends is in my writing seminar, and then we started hanging out more,” Allison said. “And then we texted a little bit, like to grab a meal, completely separate from that club. And now we kind of like randomly happen to be in the same dating club, so we’re hanging out more, just kind of a random turn of events.”

Sophie also said that their friendship came about through a serendipitous collision.

“I always thought that she would be the type of person that I would want to be friends with but we never really got a chance to connect,” Sophie said. “When I first met her, we just slowly got to know each other well. And I don’t even know how it happened, but, we just kind of bumped into each other, decided randomly to start talking to each other, and we really enjoyed each other’s company. So we see each other pretty often.”

Another close friend, Shravan Suri, also says he got close to Allison through random encounters after first meeting in Shere Khan.

“I ran into her a lot randomly, and so I think because of that, we just got closer through running into each other often,” Shravan told the Report.

Shravan says he and Allison also grew close on a Shere Khan tour in addition to getting meals together. They plan to spend Thanksgiving break together in Chicago – all in a friendship that happened through random encounters. Shravan says the change encounters outside of Shere Khan have been instrumental to their friendship. 

“We have completely different majors. We don’t have too much that would have brought us together in the same way that like acapella has,” he said.

As Princeton builds Hobson College, one of its focuses is “how the college will house spaces of creativity and serendipitous collision.” Allison and her close relationships are prime examples of how those collisions can turn into lifelong friendships.

A set of readings/videos that were fact-based was really refreshing after a week of mass spreading of misinformation surrounding immigration in the US. I’d like to talk about this more in class a little bit, since it was just beginning when we last held class, but I think the story of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH is incredibly important right now.

I mean, just this morning, J.D. Vance was pressed on CNN about spreading that misinformation. This was the interaction:

VANCE: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” the Ohio senator said.

CNN’S DANA BASH: “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

VANCE, “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.”

Let’s sit with that for a second.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

He tried to spin the comment into “creating focus,” but it has been proven time and time again that this story is false. And now those migrants are fearing for their lives, there are bomb threats and acid throwing, and the Proud Boys allegedly showed up. The power of misinformation is really on display here.

Ok, I’ll be done with that for now, because these readings laid out the facts. I really appreciated the fact-based argument from the Center for Migration Studies of New York. Using statistics and charts lays out the arguments clearly – I thought the economic impact was particularly well-explained as it pertains to the workforce.

I also appreciated Burgess’s comparison of Trump’s mass deportation plan to Operation Wetback, and why Trump’s plan would differ drastically from the operation he seeks to replicate on a much larger scale – how it “misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhower’s policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.”

Blizter also uses a fact-based argument to say that Biden’s executive order is more likely a political move to show Republicans that he is also tough on the border – as the PBS News video stated – even as it is likely ineffective and so vastly different from the bipartisan border-security bill that he had pushed for: “From a policy perspective, though, it’s difficult to see how this order would concretely address a sudden, or even a gradual, jump in new arrivals.”

Blitzer also gives a great summary of the situation as the election nears: “Judging from the polls, voters remain deeply confused about what Biden can realistically control regarding the forces of global migration. Republicans are capitalizing on the situation, and Trump is using language that’s grown openly racist and fascistic.”

Immigration came up a lot in the debate between Trump and Harris, and Trump received pushback for pushing his followers to block the bipartisan legislation. We shall see if Harris also wants to carry out the border policies that Biden did.

Comparing the two Goudeau chapters provides an interesting contrast in American immigration sentiments and policy pre- and post-World War II – but what is more interesting to me is comparing them with current stances towards immigration. Do people now lean more towards better-safe-than-sorryism or towards fulfilling what Truman referred to as America’s “responsibilities”?

In my opinion, the modern political climate – certainly in attitudes towards immigration – is far closer to the “restrictionists” vs “liberalizers” conflicts than the (mostly) unified support towards immigrants under Truman.

Certainly, the current Republican party is isolationist. They are explicitly “America first,” echoing the name of Lindbergh’s 1940 committee. Certain members of the party have continuously voted against giving aid to Ukraine, and a significant majority support a strong border with Mexico. That was even a common refrain in Trump’s 2016 campaign: “We’re going to build a wall, and Mexico’s going to pay for it.” So far, at least, one could argue that a partial wall was built, but Mexico certainly has not paid for it.

The modern isolationists’ concerns also echo their predecessors, though they have expressed even more concerns. The economic argument remains – Trump has been arguing since 2014 that “They’re taking your jobs” (referring to immigrants), and just this summer famously said that immigrants are “taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.” Trump has also said repeatedly that illegal migrants are coming from “mental institutions” but some have theorized that it’s simply because he doesn’t know the two meanings of “asylum.” In any case, isolationists have also added that the immigrants are illegally voting – and voting against their party – and the fentanyl crisis has only heightened their concerns. Are we looping back into the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stances?

If we are, I wonder how we might loop back to the post-World War II standpoint. One where we are welcoming towards those seeking refuge. Where the country feels an obligation to help them. Perhaps it would not be because of some horrible situation, but because we have the means to help other humans. Are we currently capable of that kind of humanity – where we see other humans as humans without caring about their nationality or a race?

Reading the quotes from Truman’s speech was fascinating. How many people would think that we have an obligation to refugees? It sparks an interesting debate – if something similar happened today – heaven forbid – would people think we have a continued obligation to help the refugees of war, or would people think our obligation ended because we “saved” them and ended the war? Perhaps the argument of owing it to the troops who died would win over any restrictionists? Would people support “doing what was right, even if it was hard?” (granted, that was from a movie, not Truman). Are liberalizers now more willing to fight against restrictionist legislation, as opposed to their lack of opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act?