Last week’s decisive victory for Prime Minister Boris Johnson has snapped years of debilitating uncertainty over the United Kingdom’s wayward path out of the European Union. The constitutional setup within the U.K., however, may be on a rockier road after an election that deepened its post-Brexit fissures.

In England, Mr. Johnson’s pro-Brexit Conservative Party swept the board, winning a clear parliamentary mandate for the U.K. to leave the EU on Jan. 31. The Conservatives also made gains in Labour-dominated Wales. A majority in both nations voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. 

Scotland and Northern Ireland, in contrast, voted to remain. And nationalists in both places see Brexit as a made-in-England rupture with Europe that has shaken loose the already strained bonds of the U.K.’s multinational construct. Further constitutional challenges to London’s writ are inevitable, raising the possibility that Brexit – a nationalist project – could be the undoing of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Johnson’s handling of Brexit has raised hackles in Northern Ireland, which, unlike Scotland, has a legal right to self-determination. Under the terms of Mr. Johnson’s exit deal, Northern Ireland will remain in a customs union with the EU, a compromise designed to avoid a return to land border checks with the rest of Ireland, an EU member. For Unionists who fear any weakening of political ties to Britain, that compromise is seen as a perilous first step toward Irish unification, the goal of the Nationalists who fought to end British rule in Northern Ireland until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. 

Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea in Scotland, the talk is of “IndyRef2,” another self-rule referendum. The bruising battles over Brexit are eclipsed by the bigger question of Scotland’s place in the union. 

A Scottish mandate?

Here in Scotland, the Conservatives trailed far behind the Scottish Nationalist Party, which won 48 seats out of 59 Scottish seats in Parliament, making it the third largest party. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon hailed the result as a mandate for the party’s goal of holding a second independence referendum, five years after Scotland voted to remain in the U.K.

“It’s very clear that Scotland wants a different future to the one chosen by much of the rest of the U.K.,” Ms. Sturgeon said on Saturday. “Scotland showed its opposition to Boris Johnson and the Tories, said no again to Brexit, and made very clear that we want the future of Scotland, whatever that turns out to be, to be decided by people who live here.”

That decision isn’t imminent; Mr. Johnson has ruled out another referendum. And there is little appetite among Nationalists for a Catalan-style campaign in defiance of London, so the SNP is likely to bide its time and build its case for cutting ties to post-Brexit Britain.

Moreover, Ms. Sturgeon concedes that not all ballots cast for the SNP favored independence. Analysts note that SNP ranks include “double leavers”: Leave the EU, leave the U.K.

But it was still a bad night for parties who support the 312-year-old union with England. Labour, once dominant here, is down to one seat in Parliament. The Conservatives lost half their seats, holding six. Another four went to the Liberal Democrats.

The remainder went to lawmakers – who took their seats today – committed to self-determination for Scotland’s 5.4 million population.

“The U.K. is breaking down. The constitutional order is breaking down,” says Simon Pia, a lecturer in journalism at Edinburgh Napier University and a former Labour spokesman.

A symbolic advance

One Conservative loss came in Stirling, a symbolic advance for Nationalists. “He who holds Stirling holds Scotland,” an adage attributed to Robert the Bruce, who led a victorious Scottish army against the English here in 1314. Stirling’s hilltop castle, captured and surrendered many times in subsequent wars with England, looms over the city of 94,000. 

“I think we’re in a state of turmoil and uncertainty,” says Kerry Kennedy, an SNP voter who works for Scotland’s national soccer team. She had ducked into a mall decked in Christmas decorations to avoid pelting rain. “If the SNP has power then we can get another referendum.”

Ms. Kennedy, who is 28, says she voted for independence and would do so again. Her generation split on the constitutional question, while older voters were more likely to reject independence. Nationally, voters split 55% to 45% against independence. In Stirling, the “no” margin was higher.

Vince Conlan, a 64-year-old Army veteran sitting with a fellow veteran inside the mall, was among Stirling’s “no” voters. A Conservative supporter, he wishes the SNP would give up and focus on governing Scotland. “There’s enough to worry about without ripping the union apart,” he says.

The 2014 independence referendum was framed as a once-in-a-generation vote. That was two years before Brexit, though, and nationalists say the break with Europe has shattered the consensus that Scotland is better off in the U.K. as a member of the EU. By electing a Conservative government bent on Brexit, England is fueling independence, they argue.

“We’re a tin can tied in the tail of a very strong dog, and we’d prefer not to be,” says Kathleen Jamie, a poet whose words adorn a rotunda at the site of Robert the Bruce’s victory in nearby Bannockburn. 

Brexit lessons cut both ways

The SNP argues that Brexit will lead to reduced trade and economic growth for Scotland. And while immigration was a winning card for the Brexit campaign in England and Wales, it has far less traction in Scotland, which depends on EU migrants for key industries. Non-citizens were eligible to vote in the 2014 referendum, as were 16- and 17-year-olds. 

Ms. Jamie says Scottish nationalism is not about blood and soil, but inclusion and pragmatism in a small, outward-looking nation that feels at home in Europe. “Scots are hard-headed. ... And we’ve got an eye for the main chance,” she says.

From this vantage, Brexit is a baffling family feud. “Little England has been knocking chunks out of each other. And for what?” she asks.

But while the SNP insists Brexit means Scotland has to be consulted again on its future, Unionists argue it shows just how arduous it is to redraw political, legal, and economic ties. 

Lorraine O'Sullivan/Reuters

The first ballot boxes are opened at the count center in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Dec. 12, 2019.

Take the Irish border question that bedeviled Brexit negotiations. Were Scotland to break with the U.K., it would confront similar difficulties at its southern border with England, where Roman emperors built stone walls to ward off invaders. Critics say the SNP has also failed to show independence would bring net economic benefits.

Its pitch is reminiscent of how Brexit was sold, says Murdo Fraser, a Conservative Scottish MP. “You see so many parallels ... where essentially what you’re asking people to do is make themselves poorer in exchange for having some degree of greater national sovereignty,” he says. “The rhetoric is so similar.”

Analysts say SNP leaders won’t want to risk a 50-50 divide they might lose. The weight of opinion hasn’t yet tipped either way, though how the U.K. fares outside the EU is important, says Mark Diffley, head of polling at Progress Scotland, a nationalist-leaning think tank. “If Brexit gets done and the sun doesn’t stop shining then it’s entirely possible that support [for independence] could drop off a bit,” he says. 

If nationalists don’t see a path to a clear-cut referendum victory, Ms. Sturgeon may be open to alternatives to full independence, a stance that could be more palatable to Mr. Johnson, says Mr. Pia.

Since U.K. constitutional reform in the 1990s, Scotland has exercised full powers over health, education, and other public services. Were the U.K. to offer greater devolution, this could be a third option in a referendum, says Mr. Pia, who voted “no” in 2014 but has since reconsidered.

The next flashpoint

The next flashpoint could come in 2021 when Scotland holds elections to its Parliament in Edinburgh. A clear win for the SNP would strengthen its case for another referendum, says Mr. Fraser, a former deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives. He has proposed a quasi-federal arrangement, including a reformed U.K. upper house in which regions and nations are represented, to keep the union together, including in Scotland.

“I think there are certainly those who are pro-independence who might well settle for something less than independence,” he says.

A key constituency that rejected Scottish independence in 2014 was younger urban voters, many of whom feared being shut out of the European bloc.

On a recent morning, Ben Palmer, a 42-year-old landscape architect, nursed a coffee in a cramped Edinburgh cafe. He voted “no,” and wishes the U.K. could stay in the EU. So far, he’s still not persuaded that Scotland needs to go it alone. 

“There are so many global issues now, like climate change, and the more divisions there are the harder it is to resolve these bigger issues,” he says.

Jake May/The Flint Journal/AP

Trump supporters protest outside a town hall meeting where U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) is speaking on Dec. 16, 2019, in the Oakland Center at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

The pundits were wrong, Ronna McDaniel decided. Donald Trump was viable in Michigan; she had seen the data. Even in famously purple Macomb County, the Michigan Republican Party chairwoman at the time was confident in Mr. Trump’s chances.

“We knew that something was happening in Macomb County that the rest of the country was not seeing,” said Ms. McDaniel, now the Republican National Committee chairwoman, speaking at a Monitor Breakfast last month. 

History bore her out. And the same data operation that defied political expectations and helped place Mr. Trump in the White House has returned for Round 2 – organized, flush with cash, and armed with reams of voter data dating back to 2012.

“That’s the beauty of our data: allowing us to customize for the voter and then target them through digital mail, phones, and door knocks. And really have a conversation based on the things that we know they care about,” said Ms. McDaniel.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party is candidate-less, in debt, and banking on recent investments in a new data exchange to recapture the magic that fueled President Barack Obama’s victories.

“The benefits to being an incumbent extend far beyond … name recognition and having existing relationships with supporters. It means that candidates are able to build systems and collect data for years in advance of the general election,” says Daniel Kreiss, an associate political communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

However, Google upended the 2020 digital arms race last month by changing its digital advertisement policy to restrict who political campaigns could target. Both parties decried the move, saying it doesn’t address advertisements that spread lies or misinformation, which they see as crucial in the wake of a 2016 presidential election marked by digital disinformation.

If Facebook enacts similar rules, as many experts predict, it could radically alter campaign strategy and the 2020 trajectory. While it’s difficult to measure microtargeting’s impact, there’s no doubt that it was a factor in Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, and Democrats see these tools as crucial to winning in 2020. Depending on Facebook’s moves, campaigns will need to get creative, says Republican digital strategist Eric Wilson.

“You’re going to see campaigns looking at other ad networks and other platforms and working with people who will allow this kind of targeting,” he says. “Elections are won with votes and we’ve got to find the voters.”

Richard Drew/AP

Political ads that were on Facebook displayed on a computer screen, Oct. 31, 2019, in New York. Twitter's ban on political advertising is ratcheting up the pressure on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to follow suit. Zuckerberg doubled down on Facebook’s approach in a call with analysts Wednesday, Oct. 30, he reiterated Facebook’s stance that “political speech is important."

Republican juggernaut

Losing to President Obama in the 2012 election left Republicans smarting and determined to level the technological playing field. GOP officials say they have invested over $300 million into their data operation since then and have collected roughly 3,000 data points on every voter in the country, in a system jointly owned by the Trump campaign and the RNC.

“Donald Trump has a more sophisticated operation than anybody else does,” says Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University who studies online political communication. “They’re being very conscious about tracking not just who goes to a Donald Trump rally, but maybe who goes to some kind of event that indicates they might be open to this message, something like a gun show.” 

Mobilization, rather than persuasion, is the campaigns’ focus a year out, say political analysts. The campaigns try to get potential voters onto what’s called the “ladder of engagement,” which is a marketing term for getting a customer (or voter) more and more interested and involved in the product (or candidate).

Getting voters onto this ladder has allowed the Trump campaign to build small-dollar donor lists and amass a giant war chest, says Michael Luciani, CEO of The Tuesday Co., whose app organizes campaign volunteers digitally.

“With money to run targeted advertisements, you can get more people to sign up as donors and collect more data, which allows you to both pay for and better target more advertisements,” he says.

This cycle and strategy helped the Trump campaign and the RNC raise a gobsmacking $334 million this year, more than five times as much as the DNC. (The four top-polling Democratic presidential candidates have raised about $220 million among them.) The GOP campaign is also spending more on Google and Facebook advertisements than the top Democratic candidates by a wide margin, but that disparity could change if a clear front-runner emerges.

Raising money doesn’t just fill a campaign’s coffers. It also stuffs spreadsheets. 

“A lot of what is useful about doing something like microtargeting on Facebook is not just that you can give someone a message that is really tailor-targeted to them,” says Ms. Edelson. “You get back really tailor-targeted information about how they responded to that message.”

Microtargeting or tailoring a political message to a person’s behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs helps campaigns figure out how to get a supporter even more engaged or move them up the ladder of engagement, says Bryan Whitaker, CIO for TargetSmart, a Democratic political analytics firm.

These tactics also allow campaigns to get creative in locating slivers of the population amenable to their message. For the GOP, that meant finding people who watched the Golf Channel or attended gun shows, and crafting an ad specifically to their tastes rather than an appeal to broad swaths of the population.

The Trump campaign doesn’t hoard this data either. They release the voter file, no strings attached, to any Republican running in any election across the country. 

“Whether you’re running for President or local dog catcher, any candidate in the country with an ‘R’ next to their name can access our data free of charge in our party-centric model that benefits all Republican candidates,” said RNC spokesman Michael Joyce in an email to the Monitor.

Democrats play catch-up

Democrats, though, place more restrictions on their data. Presidential candidates who want to access the highly-coveted voter file must pay $175,000 and help the DNC raise money through fundraisers and other events. Candidates are “investing in the DNC’s infrastructure, including overhauling our data and technology,” the DNC wrote in an email to the Monitor.

Since President Obama’s highly-touted data team in the 2012 election, the Democratic party has been playing catch-up. Part of that was unavoidable: saddled with $24 million in debt after 2012, the Democratic National Committee couldn’t afford to keep the team intact. (The DNC is $7 million in debt.)

One of the stars of that campaign was Vertica, which housed all the voter data and was considered quite cutting-edge. As the years passed, however, the technology grew bloated and unwieldy – so much so that after the 2016 election Hillary Clinton famously blasted the party’s data operation and said she “inherited nothing” when she became the presidential candidate.

“Think about it this way: you’ve got a brand-new Mac laptop and it moves real fast, it’s real nimble,” says Mr. Whitaker. “And six years later you’re like, oh my God, why is this thing just like so slow?”

Replacing this outdated system became the party’s top priority under new DNC Chair Tom Perez. The party unveiled Vertica’s replacement earlier this year: Data Warehouse, a Google- and cloud-based platform that can handle massive data sets and analyses that so often crashed Vertica.

The second change was the establishment of the Democratic Data Exchange, which allows the party to exchange data with outside political groups. Data Trust, the GOP equivalent, has been around since 2011 and has fueled their recent success. Mr. Whitaker says with the creation of the exchange, the Democrats have “gotten all of our pieces in place” to challenge Republicans in 2020. That said, the party still lacks a presidential candidate. Until one of the Democratic hopefuls wins, the DNC won’t have a partner with which to merge money streams, and develop a data strategy to match the unified Republican front. 

“This is, again, one of those advantages of incumbency,” says Mr. Kreiss. “It would be impossible and unreasonable for us to expect Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders to be doing a ‘vote Democrat’ pitch right now or raising money or collecting email addresses for the party.”

“In general, Republican presidents have invested more in party building and that extends to things like data operations.”

Ad policy change

Google’s policy change means political campaigns will only be able to target people based on their age, gender, or location. Previously, it was an open field. A person’s political leanings or search history was fair game, as was tracking a user once they visit the campaign’s website.

Elections are about vying for eyeballs and finding votes, and limiting campaigns’ tools limits their ability to reach potential supporters, says Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist.

“It’ll be more difficult for campaigns to build their email lists and raise money from grassroots donors because you’re limiting your ability on how to reach them,” he says.

These changes will help incumbents and hamstring campaigns without much pre-existing infrastructure, says Mr. Luciani.

“It makes it harder and more expensive to build your list of potential supporters,” he says. “It means that you also have to tailor your message to a broader audience. You can’t just microtarget people you know will support you. You’re going to be targeting a wider swath of the population.”

Both parties echo the utility of microtargeting, but it’s trickier to figure out what these effects have on the people being targeted. Mr. Kreiss says this engagement cycle and digital ads overall have created an ethos of almost perpetual mobilization.

“If you look at the Trump ads, they’re always asking their supporters to do things,” he says. “They’re asking their supporters to click a link, to give money, to sign up, to volunteer, to give over their email address. They’re being asked to engage and do more on a regular basis much more often than what would have been the case 20, 30 years ago.” 

That perpetual mobilization would not be possible without Silicon Valley’s social media giants, all of whom are reckoning with their role as communities fueled by and facilitators of political speech. Twitter and now Google have announced targeting restrictions, and Facebook seems likely to follow suit in enacting rules that could have an outsized impact upon future elections.

“What content do people consider political?” says Ms. Edelson. “It’s not entirely clear if a politician runs an ad that has no overt political message and says something like ‘Happy Holidays’ – is that a political message? Does it influence people’s perceptions of a politician? Those are things that we’re actively trying to get answers to.”

Shella Monestime’s baby boy was born in the days before Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas from Sept. 1 to 3. The unauthorized immigrant never had time to nest with him in the little wooden structure in her neighborhood in Marsh Harbour, on the Abaco Islands, Bahamas, that she called home.

The Category 5 storm hit no place harder than informal settlements such as Pigeon Peas, populated by Haitians like her or Bahamians of Haitian descent. It swept away their tenuously built homes and crushed others into broken heaps, the wooden planks tattered as if they were paper strips. The worst hurricane to ever hit the Bahamas, Dorian has officially taken 70 lives, but more than 200 people remain missing, many of them believed to be unauthorized immigrants. Thousands have been rendered homeless.

All that remained of Ms. Monestime’s Pigeon Peas settlement has since been bulldozed. Today it is a flat field of mud, rock, and weeds. In the middle stands a lone Bahamian flag, tied with string to a reedy, branchless tree. The flag could have been raised as an act of solidarity, of Bahamians coming together in shared loss. It is also easy to interpret it as a statement, of one group asserting rights over another and claiming control of land.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“We just lost everything. We have no clothes, no home, no money. We have to start all over again. People died, and all they are talking about is people getting deported.” – Shella Monestime, a Haitian evacuee from the Abaco Islands, standing outside a shelter in Nassau, Bahamas, with her daughter Briana (right)

Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis has vowed that such “shantytowns” will not be rebuilt. He’s also decreed that no immigrants who are here illegally are welcome in the shelters the government is erecting for those left without homes, even though immigration status has become a desperate affair as many residents have lost documentation or were in legal limbo before the storm hit. The Minnis government has resumed deporting unauthorized Haitians affected by Dorian as well – a move condemned by international bodies such as the United Nations. 

“We just lost everything. We have no clothes, no home, no money. We have to start all over again,” says Ms. Monestime. “People died, and all they are talking about is people getting deported.”

Hurricane Dorian has exposed a current of hostility toward Haitians in Bahamian society – and provoked a reckoning in some quarters. But the Bahamas is hardly alone in coping with the deeper effects of megastorms. Natural disasters may hit indiscriminately, but they are aggravating social divides – along class, race, ethnic, and nationalist lines – from hurricanes such as Katrina and Sandy to wildfires in California. Experts warn the potential divisions will only get worse as storms and weather-related events intensify in the years ahead.

To be sure, the way communities prepare and evacuate and how they eventually rebuild depends in part on their vulnerability in the first place, as well as the resilience of local residents. But many worry that in the face of climate change, the gaps between rich and poor people will grow and the downward cycles of poverty escalate as wealthier residents are able to respond to and recover from natural disasters while poor people suffer and languish.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A man walks through an area heavily damaged by Hurricane Dorian on Great Abaco, Bahamas, which still has no electricity or running water.

Nowhere was this dynamic clearer than after Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people across five states in 2005. In New Orleans, the television images of poor, mostly black residents stranded on rooftops or huddled in the Superdome that were beamed into living rooms crystallized the wider racial implications of such calamities, says Susan Cutter, a geographer who studies disasters at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.  

Often the inequalities that arise are hidden or invisible, she says. They are not covered by the media or are seemingly minor details of a person’s life. But they carry huge implications. Take the current wildfires in California. As Pacific Gas & Electric Co. carried out planned power outages to control the flames in October, it was the poorer residents who didn’t have access to generators to power their homes or businesses. That can result in devastating losses of income.

Karen Norris/Staff

More permanent social divisions are often created during rebuilding, as insurers and those with money get the opportunity to erect new homes. Something as simple as renting versus homeownership alters the path forward, too, since renters frequently have no insurance protection. Often the people displaced are forced to relocate permanently, even to new states or countries.

John Mutter, a Columbia University professor who wrote “The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer,” says that during reconstruction the divides can be intentional. “After the cameras have gone and maybe money starts coming in, it’s a time when people will take advantage and attempt at least some social reengineering,” he says.

Katrina, the most costly storm in U.S. history, disproportionately affected African Americans. It reshaped New Orleans and accelerated gentrification, making it difficult for a lot of poor residents who had fled the city to return, many of whom lived in the traditionally black Lower Ninth Ward. Dr. Mutter sees a similar pattern in the wake of Hurricane Sandy that struck New Jersey in 2012. The wealthiest homeowners have rebuilt, with new standards, creating a more affluent and exclusive community than was previously there.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A Bahamian flag flies on a denuded tree in Pigeon Peas, a former Haitian shantytown that the government cleared after Hurricane Dorian destroyed the homes.

Yet it isn’t always easy to decide who should rebuild and what kinds of structures should go up. Cheap, overcrowded, code-breaking housing is dangerous for residents. Not rebuilding shantytowns in the low-lying areas of Marsh Harbour is sound environmentally – and many would argue morally. And yet the rebuilding process is also a time when more powerful interests – developers, wealthier residents, government agencies – can exert their control over devastated areas. “They’ll do a lot of anti-social things to the group that they don’t like and get away with it,” Dr. Mutter says.

In the Bahamas, immigration adds another layer of complexity to the divisions that arise around recovery, and many worry that the kind of social engineering that Dr. Mutter studies is already underway. “In the name of nationalism and in the name of Bahamian sovereignty, people are saying, ‘We need to remove these [Haitian] people while we can, while we have the opportunity, thanks to Dorian,’” says Christopher Curry, an associate professor of history at the University of the Bahamas in Nassau.

#BahamasStrong?

Hurricane Dorian spared few on Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands in the northern stretches of the archipelago, from the rich who own multimillion-dollar second homes to the residents squatting in makeshift settlements. Half of all buildings on these islands were destroyed. 

The hurricane bypassed the capital, Nassau, and the southern islands. Yet in Marsh Harbour in November, when the Monitor visited, there was still no electricity or running water, and roads were littered with demolished vehicles. Thousands of residents remain off the Abaco Islands, staying with family or in shelters in Nassau. Some men have started to return to rebuild, often separating from their families indefinitely. 

The Bahamas has come together to help recover. The unity born of tragedy can be felt across the islands, on church bulletin boards, on social media walls under #BahamasStrong, in soup kitchens, in the way residents loan each other cars. But not everyone is included.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A Haitian woman does laundry outside a church where she is staying after losing her home on Great Abaco in Hurricane Dorian.

The Abaco Islands are home to a significant population of unauthorized Haitians who came to work in the thriving tourist and construction industries. Not all are here illegally. Some languish in legal limbo, having submitted applications or permits that they say have been grinding through the immigration process for years.

Children born in the Bahamas to foreign parents do not get birthright citizenship, as in the United States, and some Haitians have missed the window in which they can apply for citizenship at age 18. Others have been thrust into unauthorized status post-Dorian because of a loss of documentation or work permits tied to jobs that no longer exist, revealing problems in the immigration system. 

Relief workers say the lack of papers and uncertain status prevent many from seeking assistance out of fear of arrest and deportation, and they allege repatriation is occurring without due process. Amid the cleanup, the bulldozing and constant clang of clearing, the Haitian community is in hiding. At least two groups working in the Bahamas say the government has instructed them not to help Haitians who don’t have documentation. 

“The biggest thing that I’m seeing is a need for some immigration help for the Haitian people, flat out, because they are being threatened with deportation back to a place that is essentially a war zone at the moment,” says Jana Stone, project leader here for OpenWorld Relief, a nonprofit that helps people recover from natural disasters. “So there is a very strong sense of instability as a result of that and great, great fear.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Haitian immigrants who lost their homes look through boxes of donations at a church.

Many unauthorized Haitians have sought help from the churches that dot the Abaco Islands. But those haven’t proved safe, either. Marc Hindi Augustin, who like thousands of other Haitians came here after the devastating earthquake in his country in 2010, says immigration officials seized two men recently without papers.

“You are empty-handed and they do that to you,” says Mr. Augustin, who has permanent residency.  

Kelly Pierre is a preacher at the International Gospel Mission, an evangelical church that ministers to Haitian immigrants and their descendants. A Bahamian of Haitian descent, he, like many people here, does not support illegal immigration. But at a moment when everything is lost, he wonders where the nation’s heart is.

“It’s not right, in the eyes of God, and in the eyes of man,” he says. “For men, if you have compassion, you must know what to do, and what not to do. And at this particular time right now, when the hurricane just passed and almost destroyed everybody ... and you begin to just put handcuffs on people and carry that person to jail just because they don’t have status, it’s not right.”

A cycle of vulnerability

Various U.N. organizations have warned the Bahamas that migrants must not be left out of the humanitarian response, and that increased vulnerability only leads to more exploitation and abuse – even more human trafficking.

But while pressure is mounting on the government here to help the most destitute, a larger problem looms for vulnerable people around the world: climate change. Brad Kieserman, vice president for disaster operations and logistics for the American Red Cross, says that societies overall today have a better understanding of the needs of indigent people in the aftermath of disasters.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Family photos lie on the ground near Pigeon Peas, a settlement that was destroyed in the hurricane.

This is in part because of improved data and tracking his group is implementing on the ground in the Bahamas to ensure that the most vulnerable receive assistance. But globally the risks facing poor people threaten to increase faster than the response. 

“As climate change causes storms to increase in intensity, the human toll also increases and the poorest and most vulnerable suffer the most,” he says in an email. “This will prove to be one of the most persistent challenges for humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross. We are seeing a new normal of heavier rainfall, higher temperatures, stronger hurricanes, and historic wildfires.”

All this could lead to a downward spiral that hurts rich and poor countries alike. Developing nations that face recurring disasters may not be able to revive, while countries such as the U.S. and members of the European Union may experience an influx of disaster migrants.

“The best example of that cycle of vulnerability is Puerto Rico,” says Dr. Cutter of the University of South Carolina. “Its population for a variety of reasons – political, economic, social – has been in decline for decades. And yet it’s in a very hazardous [position] in the hurricane area. And so it’s never able to recover.”

The chronic decline, in turn, can provoke an immigration debate – one like Dorian has done here over the Haitians. 

Tensions exposed

On trade, economics, and culture, Haiti and the Bahamas have enjoyed a shared history over hundreds of years. It wasn’t until an exodus of Haitians fleeing the dictatorships of François Duvalier and later his son, Jean-Claude, between the 1950s and 1980s that the views of Bahamians hardened over the influx of migrants. It didn’t help that the Bahamas was growing more prosperous.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Kelly Pierre, a pastor and builder who is Bahamian-Haitian, sits in the living room of his home, which withstood the storm but lost its furnishings.

In recent years, with the devastation of the 2010 Haitian earthquake and now with Dorian, tensions have escalated. “I think this storm has exposed it,” says Ava Turnquest, a local journalist. “Whereas before the conversation was sort of layered, it’s now more aggressive.”

Ms. Turnquest says some of the xenophobia that has surfaced is not representative of Bahamian society. But there is a wider perception, and fear, that immigrants from much larger and poorer Haiti could overrun the Bahamas’ young democracy. She’s at her office on a Sunday, because Prime Minister Minnis is about to give a press conference in which he announces he won’t allow any “illegals” in Abaco Islands shelters, “full stop,” he told reporters.

It’s a message that finds broad support among Bahamians. Many say there is too much need among their own to have to care for unauthorized workers from Haiti. “We know they are people, but we are poor, too,” says Perry Feaster, who is living in a tent with a dozen others in a field near Marsh Harbour. He was a scuba diver before Dorian. Now he collects scrap metal to earn money.

Mistrust only grows with a lack of good numbers. The 2010 census estimated that 11% of the Bahamas’ population was Haitian, but that was prior to the 2010 earthquake. An assessment by the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, in 2018, put the number at 25%. Further, no one has a firm number on how many Haitians, including those born in the Bahamas, have proper documentation.

Bahamian anthropologist, poet, and playwright Nicolette Bethel says some of the fears Bahamians have about the unauthorized Haitian community are rational, but others are irrational – and uncomfortably familiar. “The kind of language that is used to talk about the ‘illegal’ population” – code for Haitian, she says – “is virtually indistinguishable from the kind of language that was used to talk about black Bahamians 40 or 50 years ago: the lack of sanitation, lack of morals and honesty, unchecked reproduction. This is a highly stratified society that has never dealt with the racism on which it was founded and just maintains the systems of oppression and changes the players.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

People line up to get gas for $6 a gallon at one of the only service stations open on the Abaco Islands.

When President Donald Trump shut U.S. doors to Bahamian victims of Dorian who didn’t have paperwork – saying the country had to be careful about “some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers” – many people hoped it would cause people here to reflect on their own views.

“When I saw what Trump said, I thought for a moment Bahamians would sit back and say, ‘We are treated like refugees, just like we treat Haitians; maybe we should pause and think,’” says Fred Smith, a human rights lawyer in the Bahamas. He was disappointed, he says.

But voices of moderation are starting to emerge. Allyson Maynard-Gibson, former attorney general of the Bahamas, wrote an opinion piece in a local newspaper calling for “safe spaces” to search for a consensus on immigration policy that could be a model.

“This is not just the Bahamas. [Rejection of migrants] is happening all over the world,” she says in an interview. “The Bahamas could be a signal to the world for how things could be better or different. ... It’s terrible, terrible, terrible. But out of this comes an opportunity to face it and to deal with it instead of sweeping it under the carpet, again.”

“It’s easy ... to just vilify one group” 

The Rt. Rev. Laish Boyd, bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands, called for cooler heads around the immigration debate in a formal address in October. He suggested forming an authority made up of churches, chambers of commerce, and civil society groups to deal with the issue more honestly and less emotionally.

In an interview at the diocese office in Nassau, he says the Bahamas must recognize the full contribution of Haitian immigrants to every facet of life here – not to mention the critical role they could play in rebuilding places like Marsh Harbour. “It’s easy in [this] kind of environment to just vilify one group,” he says. “Never mind we are all responsible for the circumstances surrounding illegal immigration in this country, by our failure to enforce laws, by our selectively enforcing laws, by our not establishing procedures and protocols and sticking to them.

“In this environment, let’s not jump on a scapegoat issue because we are under pressure, under strain. Let’s not vilify anybody. Let’s look at it calmly and in a balanced way.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“In this environment, let’s not jump on a scapegoat issue because we are under pressure, under strain. Let’s not vilify anybody. Let’s look at it calmly and in a balanced way.” – The Rt. Rev. Laish Boyd, bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands

Jeanise Pierre would certainly welcome a more balanced view – and more help. She was living in the Mudd, another informal settlement in Marsh Harbour that was destroyed, and worked as a hotel maid. Now the single mother has been living for two months in the Kendal G.L. Isaacs National Gymnasium in Nassau, the main government-run shelter where some 600 people still remain. A hundred miles away on a recent day in Marsh Harbour, a bulldozer clears the homes that appear as heaps strewn across the Mudd. Signs of their owners poke out from the rubble – shoes, stuffed animals, curtains, a bike.

Ms. Pierre has not been able to return to see the remains of her home. “They have no plan; their only plan is to carry us all in here back to Haiti,” she says. “I lost family. They need to give us a chance.”

Her friend, Ms. Monestime, has no idea if she can ever return to Great Abaco, because if she does, she risks getting sent back to Haiti. She says she has tried to secure working papers in the past 17 years, but she’s always been told that she has to return to Haiti to apply and wait for processing. With three Bahamian-born children, she says that’s not viable.

“I can’t make the laws in this country,” she says. “But if they put me in a plane, they will put me in it alone. They will not take my children to Haiti. This is their home, their future. I will go, but they will have to keep my children.”

Matt Rourke/AP

Protesters demonstrate Dec. 3, 2019, in Philadelphia in support of supervised injection sites.

The ongoing overdose crisis is pushing public health officials to consider new tools. In 2017, drug overdoses in the United States claimed more than 70,000 lives. Nearly 7 out of 10 involved opioids.

Last year logged a slight decline in fatal overdoses, provisional data show. But communities countrywide remain desperate to save more neighbors. Harm reduction advocates admit there is no panacea to the public health crisis. But they urge a new intervention: supervised consumption sites.

What exactly are they?

Also called safe injection facilities or overdose prevention sites, these venues permit the use of previously obtained illicit drugs in a clean space with medical supervision. Staff are trained to reverse overdoses, provide sterile supplies, and offer a bridge to recovery services.

More than 100 of them operate worldwide. Multiple U.S. cities have mulled opening these sites, but legal uncertainty, community concerns, and stigma have stalled plans. 

The American Medical Association endorses a pilot site. Many public health officials consider supervised consumption lifesaving. They note health risks of drug use in unhygienic public spaces, plus the rise in overdose deaths involving fentanyl – a potent synthetic opioid that can trigger an overdose within seconds.

Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, says despite medical monitoring available to individuals who are over-sedated, around five overdoses occur weekly in and around her building. At an October advocacy event at the Massachusetts statehouse, Dr. Gaeta said not allowing supervised consumption “feels like a treatment gap.” 

Domingos DaRosa supports treatment, but not supervised consumption. The Boston native doesn’t like the idea of permitting use of illegal drugs. As a black man, he says he’s also wary the sites could attract increased law enforcement.

The activist and youth football coach sees the overdose crisis as a public safety issue. Mr. DaRosa began cleaning up needles from playgrounds and parks years ago with children in mind. He was pricked by a discarded needle at age 12.

“Folks who have nothing to do with [the opioid crisis] are the ones that are catching the wrong end of the stick,” he says. Mayor Joe Curtatone of nextdoor Somerville, Massachusetts, is exploring plans to open a facility in 2020. The state’s U.S. attorney Andrew Lelling, however, has pledged to challenge such a site.

Mr. DaRosa and other safe consumption critics warn of quality of life issues that the sites might spur. Advocates counter these concerns are based on stigma, not science. 

So how effective are these sites?

Limited research suggests supervised consumption is a promising public health intervention. Studies on sites in Canada, Europe, and Australia have associated them with decreased risks of drug-related harms – including reduced overdose deaths – and an uptake in treatment services.

Vancouver-based Insite – North America’s first legal supervised consumption site that opened in 2003 – has reported 6,440 overdose interventions and zero deaths. Like syringe exchanges, these sites aren’t known to increase drug use or crime. 

Harm reductionists say syringe exchange models could expand to include supervised consumption. Syringe exchanges began offering sterile equipment as an effective response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and now operate in 40 states. 

Public health researchers in the U.S. acknowledge more data on safe injection sites is needed. After all, interventions that work in one place don't always perform well in others, says Peter Davidson, associate professor in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Diego.

“I'm concerned that we would go to a great deal of effort to set one of these things up here, and it would actually produce negative effects that were unintended,” says Dr. Davidson, who has studied an underground site in the U.S. “There are questions that will remain until we get [a pilot site] and test it properly,” which he supports.

Aubri, a harm reductionist with Boston Users Union, says she witnessed multiple reversed overdoses while helping run an underground site. As health professionals plan sanctioned sites, she urges collaboration with people who use drugs. “Drug users have been operating safe sites for decades,” says Aubri, who requested that her last name not be used. “We are the experts already.”  

How likely are supervised consumption sites to open in the U.S.?

At least a dozen cities have considered opening sanctioned sites, but the federal government has warned of shuttering sites that allow illegal drug use, which it has said would “violate federal law.”

In February, the government filed a lawsuit to prevent the opening of nonprofit Safehouse’s services in Philadelphia. U.S. District Judge Gerald McHugh buoyed activists’ hopes in October, ruling that Safehouse does not violate federal drug law.

Safehouse still seeks a declaratory judgment, and may face an appeal. Days after the ruling, U.S. Attorney William McSwain wrote to a lawyer for Safehouse of his intent to obstruct the services from opening if the nonprofit moved forward during an appeals process. 

Still, Ronda Goldfein, vice president of Safehouse, says she’s optimistic about opening at least one site in 2019, and hopes regular meetings with the community will help address local concerns. She adds, “We want to be good neighbors.”

Staff writer Riley Robinson contributed to this report. 

AP

Singer songwriter John Legend, left, greets Carmen Brown who was the first person called up in a court hearing aimed at restoring her right to vote under Florida's Amendment 4, Nov. 8, 2019, in Miami.

As his first major act in office, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear helped a group that didn’t vote for him. The group didn’t have that option.

On Dec. 12, Mr. Beshear signed an executive order that restored the right to vote and to hold public office to more than 140,000 Kentuckians who had finished their sentences for criminal convictions. “By restoring these voting rights, we declare that everyone counts in Kentucky,” he said. “We all matter.”

The decision follows a wave of reenfranchisements that has swept the country in the last two decades. Almost half the nation’s states have passed similar legislation since 1997, restoring voting rights to more than 1.5 million Americans. Iowa is now alone in withholding an automatic right to vote from former felons upon leaving prison.

For Kentucky, the executive order is not a small matter. The state has had the third-highest disenfranchisement rate in the country. One in 10 of its citizens couldn’t vote, including 1 in 4 African Americans. Those seeking to regain their right had to individually apply to the governor. Now that right will be restored automatically. People who complete their sentences will again be citizens in full.

More broadly, the governor’s decision is significant in where it stops. The second section of the order states that it applies only to those convicted of nonviolent offenses. So while received as an act of forgiveness, Mr. Beshear’s order shows that forgiveness too has its limits. Not everyone counts.

Who deserves a second chance? The question is gaining attention in an age in which criminal justice reform has become a bipartisan issue. It’s easy for most to forgive those convicted of low-level drug offenses – as Oklahoma did in November. But forgiving those who commit violent crimes or sex offenses is a thornier issue. In fact, the previous governor, Matt Bevin, was widely criticized for pardoning more than 400 convicts, some sentenced for murder and rape, before he left office.

As reformers attempt to refocus the criminal justice system on rehabilitation, Americans will need to decide who they think deserves rehabilitation. Research shows sex offenders re-offend at lower rates than those convicted of many other crimes, such as theft. The extremely abhorrent nature of their crime, though, makes it easy to understand why many worry about blanket reintegration – and may prefer no reintegration at all. How do you maintain rights of those who served their time and still protect your community? The question is still open.

One reason that criminal justice reform has become so popular is a large share of Americans have had a loved one in prison at some point. Such an experience can create avenues for empathy.

The wave of reenfranchisements may do just the same. Former felons vote at disproportionately low rates, but as questions of reform and forgiveness gain prominence, their past experiences will become more valuable. To create a more compassionate and restorative prison system, it may help to ask for ideas from those who have been in prison. At least now, in most places, they can put their opinions into action at the voting booth or as a political candidate.