The Refugee Crisis on my Corner

What's chocolate got to do with it?

I am co-host of “Wait, What?”, a new show/podcast with comedian Krystyna Hutchinson. We launch with a live event in NYC on January 20, featuring Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats and many other books. Please come join us if you can. Here is a link to learn more and buy tickets.

As a thinker, I would call myself a bricoleur which comes from the French word bricolage, meaning something like “improvisation,” or working with the materials just at hand. I was never formally trained as a philosopher and I keep picking up ideas on the fly. I am inspired by phenomenology — a result of hundreds of psychedelic journeys that pulled apart the local space-time like Silly Putty. These trips gave me direct knowledge of certain esoteric/hermetic insights that are, now, part of my baseline mental and psychological architecture. They also made me aware of the “otherness” of being — the irreducible strangeness as well as the allegorical, mythical qualities of reality as we explore and mediate it.

According to Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is “a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’… It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide.”

As a separate, singular consciousness that undertakes an ongoing ritual-practice of reflecting on its immersion in the ‘whatever-this-is', I find the surrounding world showers me with gifts, puzzle-pieces, and clues, for which I am grateful. Right now, the particular street in Manhattan’s East Village where I happen to live—7th St between Avenue B and C—provides opportunity for ongoing sociological/phenomenological reflections, which I will seek to share in what follows.

Each day, lines of migrants and asylum-seekers at St Brigid’s in the East Village stretch around the block.

St Brigid’s, a Catholic school on the corner of 7th St and Avenue B, closed down for good in 2019. This ugly brick two-story building has been repurposed into a major processing center for the thousands of refugees and asylum-seekers descending on New York City now. I’ve heard 1,400 migrants are arriving daily, with over 140,000 new arrivals in the past six months. They come from collapsing nations such as Venezuela and the Ivory Coast, as well as other African and South American countries. When they cross the border from Mexico, the Governor of Texas gives them bus tickets to New York City, which has laws protecting asylum-seekers. New York City’s terrible Mayor, Eric Adams, is pursuing legal actions against Texas to stop this influx, which is overwhelming the city’s resources.

Every day, hundreds of men, mostly young African guys, line up there, the line snaking up Avenue B toward 8th St and even around the corner back toward Avenue C. A gaggle of police keep watch over them, as fights can break out in the line. The refugees also cluster in Tompkins Square Park, smoking cigarettes and listening to African music on a cheap boom box. At night, some of the men who haven’t been assigned temporary shelters sleep in the January cold under plastic sheeting, waiting for another chance. I’ve been told the men are offered free plane tickets to fly anywhere else in the US.

Around 50 million people in Central and West Africa do not have enough food to eat, according to Reuters: “A record 49.5 million people are expected to go hungry in West and Central Africa next year due to a combination of conflict, climate change and high food prices, the United Nations said on Tuesday.” A significant percentage of the migrants and asylum-seekers are coming from the Ivory Coast, which produces nearly half of the world’s chocolate. Unfortunately, chocolate production has led to massive deforestation, which intensifies droughts that harms farmers, contributing to famine.

AI prompt: “A cartoon shows fat cat executives from Hershey's and Nestle's making millions from chocolate while starving children farm cocoa beans in the Ivory Coast while forests are destroyed along with all of the forest’s apes.”

According to “The Real Price of a Chocolate Bar” by Fred Pierce, the Ivory Coast has lost more than 80 percent of its forests in the last fifty years — and with it, most of its primates — as a result of cocoa production, with American companies like Nestle, Hershey’s, and Mars playing a major role:

Most cocoa is grown in monocultures of what is known as the full-sun system, requiring the removal of all surrounding trees. Meeting the world’s insatiable demand for the beans that make chocolate has resulted in many protected areas being “completely converted to farms,” according to Eloi Anderson Bitty of the University Felix Houphouet-Boigny in Abidjan.

Wildlife, especially forest elephants and chimpanzees, have suffered badly. The forests form part of the West African Guinea Forests, famous for its primates. But Bitty found that 13 of the 23 protected forests he surveyed no longer had any primates.

Pressure has been growing on the government to act. Yet, rather than redoubling its efforts to keep cocoa growers out of its protected forests, the government plans to remove the largely ineffectual legal protection from thousands of square miles of wrecked rainforests and convert them into agro-forestry reserves, to be run by international chocolate manufacturers.

According to Al-Jazeera, while the Ivory Coast produces 45% of the world’s cocoa beans, it “receives just four percent of the chocolate industry’s estimated annual worth of $100 billion. Millions of cocoa farmers in the country survive on an average of just $0.78 a day, according to the World Economic Forum.” Of course, corporations like Hershey’s use every possible mechanism to avoid paying more to Ivory Coast farmers.

And of course, it is not chocolate alone that is forcing this ongoing migration. Cocoa beans are just one among many foods, minerals, and resources that are being extracted and over-produced, leading to an intensifying collapse of communities, societies, and nation states across the Global South. According to The NY Times in Drought Touches a Quarter of Humanity, U.N. Says, Disrupting Lives Globally:

Olive groves have shriveled in Tunisia. The Brazilian Amazon faces its driest season in a century. Wheat fields have been decimated in Syria and Iraq, pushing millions more into hunger after years of conflict. The Panama Canal, a vital trade artery, doesn’t have enough water, which means fewer ships can pass through. And the fear of drought has prompted India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, to restrict the export of most rice varieties.

The United Nations estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide, or nearly a quarter of humanity, were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. “Droughts operate in silence, often going unnoticed and failing to provoke an immediate public and political response,” wrote Ibrahim Thiaw, head of the United Nations agency that issued the estimates late last year, in his foreword to the report.

The many droughts around the world come at a time of record-high global temperatures and rising food-price inflation, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, involving two countries that are major producers of wheat, has thrown global food supply chains into turmoil, punishing the world’s poorest people.

I am surprised, considering that Mayor Adams has declared the migrant situation an emergency, to find so little reporting on what’s happening, and why, in the mainstream media. Smaller local outlets have been covering it, such as this report from The Villager, interviewing a Senegalese migrant: “In my country there is so much violence, political violence… I am not getting work and if you try to protest, they kill them.”

Fox5NY published one short video essay, interviewing a family from the Ivory Coast on how they made it to New York. Apparently, they flew to Brazil with one of their four children and then walked for an entire year up from Brazil, through South and Central America, until they crossed the Mexican border into Texas, where an organization gave them a plane ticket to New York.

"We suffered so much, in Africa if you don't have money, you are nobody, there is no work in my country, no food, the people mistreat you,” the refugee-seeker said. As they walked, they often went many days without food or water.

As with my mixed feelings about the war in Israel, I am observing how the limits of my compassion are getting tested by this deepening migrant crisis. I want to understand my inchoate and not always politically correct feelings, as I suspect they are shared by many others also. Most people, of course, simply block out what is happening and don’t even think about it, as with the climate emergency.

I do find that we in the First World or “Global North” — particularly North America — are directly responsible for the climate emergency and resource crisis we unleashed through our hogging of the Earth’s resources, including massive over-consumption of Hershey’s and Nestle’s chocolate produced in slave-labor conditions in Africa. Helping the people who are already pouring up North from the Global South could be seen as our moral responsibility — yet we do not have the social structures in place to deal with this situation. We can’t even take care of our own people decently at this point. What are we going to do when tens and then hundreds of millions of people are flooding North, fleeing from wars and famine?

I usually write out of a new cafe around the corner on Avenue B with a clean Scandinavian vibe, where a latte and croissant (or chocolate croissant) costs over $10 with tip (two weeks wages for workers in Ivory Coast chocolate farms, which includes widespread use of child slaves) . By late morning, this cafe has filled up with mostly Anglo-European college students and “cognitive workers” who build and design websites, orchestrate digital marketing campaigns, work for AI startups or in private equity, and so on.

Somehow or other, we all extract financial resources for our personal use from the global economy through our skill and training in manipulating various symbol systems (numbers, words, shapes, legal code) on the Internet. We generally work soundlessly, absorbed in shaping the flow of pixels across our glowing rectangular screens. We have been entrained to be phenomenologically oblivious to what’s happening outside of the screen—in our shared, unmediated social reality.

In the mornings, one or two of the African asylum-seekers will come into the cafe, begging at the counter for a cup of coffee or some money, knowing no English. These are jarring moments of desperation, when the wall between worlds is suddenly breached. I expect that these walls will be breached ever-more frequently in the years just ahead of us, until the barriers collapse. And when that happens, where will we be?

I plan to continue this reflection next time. Please share your thoughts in the comments.