HodgBlog

The city that I live in (Shoreline, a suburb just north of Seattle) closed two elementary schools this year, and the city of Seattle has also been talking about closing schools, in both cases because the number of children enrolled in school has declined. Yet the population of both Seattle and Shoreline must be increasing, as houses are replaced by condo buildings and apartments, so I had been somewhat confused about this… Until someone yesterday pointed out the (in retrospect) fairly obvious reason: housing in the nearby suburbs and the city of Seattle is getting more and more expensive. So people in my situation (two good jobs, no kids) can still afford to buy houses, but families with school children are having to move farther north or south, to find housing they can afford. So we are closing elementary schools in my part of town, and Kent (a farther-out suburb) has been building new ones. Food for thought…

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I finally saw Michael Moore’s film Sicko. It’s very scary. The main point of the film is that in the U.S., even if you have “good” health insurance, you have no guarantee that you will get good health care. This is because hospitals and doctors make health care decisions based on what your insurance company will pay them, rather than what is good for you, and the insurance companies base their decisions on what is good for their stockholders, not what is good for you. Some people do get the care they need, but it is expensive — 50% of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are caused, at least in part, by medical costs, even though the majority of the people filing for bankruptcy with medical costs as a contributing factor actually do have health insurance.

Even before seeing the film, I knew the situation was bad for people in the U.S. with no health insurance, and felt that we needed, as a country, to do something to improve health care for the poorest people. But now I feel strongly that we need to do something about the situation for people with health insurance too. It seems to me that the general public is becoming more aware of the issue, so maybe there is hope that our government will do something about the health care situation.

However, I’m not sure it will be happening soon. Clearly, any proposal that keeps for-profit insurance companies in charge of health care decisions will not solve the problems of our current system. But if you read through the health care plans on the top Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates’ web sites, you will see that to the extent that they have plans, they all rely heavily on getting more people covered by private insurance. None of the candidates seems to realize the scope of the problem for people who do have insurance. Maybe Michael Moore needs to sit down and watch his film with each of them until they really understand the issue.

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In my volunteer work (teaching English to adult immigrants and Spanish-English interpreting), I come in contact with a lot of immigrants — some are here legally, and some are not. Illegal immigration has also been in the news a lot lately, so I find myself thinking about the subject frequently. When I hear what our so-called leaders are saying about illegal immigration, I get frustrated, because I don’t think they’re thinking constructively. So, I decided I’d better get my own thoughts together.

Facts and Statistics

• According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there were about 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., as of March 2005, which is about 3.8% of the total U.S. population.
• Of the 11 million estimated illegal immigrants living in the U.S., again according to the Pew Hispanic Center, about 7.2 million of them are working illegally, amounting to 5% of the U.S. workforce.
• The most common industries for illegal immigrants in the U.S. are construction (1.4 million illegal workers, or 12% of the workforce) and “leisure and hospitality” (1.2 million illegal workers, or 10% of the workforce).
• The median earnings of illegal workers are around $400 per week for men, and less (I am not sure how much less) for women.

Observations

• Basic economics (and logic) tells us that people make decisions based on benefits to themselves. So, who is benefiting from illegal immigrant labor?
  • The businesses that hire illegal workers are benefiting. Clearly, if businesses could hire legal residents at the same total cost (considering salary, benefits, hours, and productivity) as illegal workers, they would hire the workers with papers, to avoid legal problems. So, the illegal workers must be working for lower wages than legal residents would, doing work that legal residents would not do, or working under conditions that legal residents would not tolerate.
  • The illegal workers are benefiting. Typical workers I have met say they came here because they had very little chance of finding work of any type in Mexico, and literally no way to live without work (i.e. not many social services, food banks, soup kitchens, etc.). Here, they can find some work, and they say that even if they are living on the streets of Seattle (many do), their life here is better than what they had available at home: at least they will not starve if they have to go a week or two without working. The people I’ve met who have families here, especially the women, are an inspiration for their dedication to improving their lives and the lives of their children.
  • There are some costs offsetting the benefits. For the illegal workers, these include the cost to get here (hiring someone to convey them across the border, risking life in desert crossings, etc.) and the risk of deportation. For businesses, they include the risk of fines and bad publicity if they are discovered hiring illegal workers. But the fact that we currently have 7 million illegal workers means that these costs must be much lower than the benefits for these two groups.
• This situation is not new. Illegal immigrants have been coming here for decades, mostly from Mexico, and there has been ample work for them for decades. The risk of being discovered and deported has seldom or never been high enough to discourage people from coming here to work; the risk of fines has seldom or never been high enough for businesses to stop using illegal immigrant labor.
• The public in the U.S. is asking for solutions to the “problem” of illegal immigration. But the politicians (funded by business interests) are not offering effective solutions on a scale that would make any difference, any more than they have for the last few decades. Here are the options that I think could actually reduce the number of illegal immigrant workers:
  • The most reliable and humane way to do so would be to improve conditions in Mexico and Central America. If all Mexicans had real options for a good life at home, they wouldn’t come so far from their families and familiar settings to work illegally here — the net benefit would no longer outweigh the cost.
  • We could also erase the advantage businesses gain by hiring illegal workers: make sure that illegal workers have the same salary, benefits, and workplace protections that legal workers do, or give them legal status.
  • The other option is to increase enforcement by a lot (deportations of workers or fines to businesses) to increase the economic costs to businesses or workers.
• The other question is whether illegal immigrant labor is a problem at all. I do not think it is a problem that the workers are working here to improve their lives. But they experience problems due to the fact that they are living and working here illegally, such as constant fear, lowered social status, and loss of employment rights. It’s not a particularly easy life, and it doesn’t seem right that people who are merely trying to improve their lives, and who are also contributing to our economy, should have to live that way.

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Lately, I have been hearing a lot of politicians promoting biofuels, mainly biodiesel and bioethanol. They seem to believe that biofuels are going to play a major role in solving our upcoming energy crisis, but logic and science do not support that idea. I gave a few reasons in my earlier article on the coming energy crisis, and an article I just read in Science News adds even more. Here are some thoughts:

• We need to generate more energy. The world’s population is growing, and per capita energy use is increasing as the developing world raises its average standard of living. Experts estimate we will need to approximately double the world’s energy production by 2050.
• Biofuels are really a means of transferring energy, not generating energy. Scientists who carefully calculate the energy used in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and refining biofuels find that it takes nearly as much (or in some cases more) energy to create the biofuels as the biofuels contain. So, we can use biofuels as a means of transferring energy from one form to another, but we cannot really use them as a means of generating energy.
• We need to grow more food. As the world’s population grows, we will clearly need to produce more food in order to feed the population (unless we all convert to vegetarianism, which would allow us to eat food currently being used to feed farm animals).
• Biofuel crops are grown on agricultural land. If we want to produce biofuels, we will need to either convert food-crop land to fuel-crop land, or convert non-agricultural land to fuel-crop land.
• Biofuels use a large amount of land. For instance, if we converted an entire year’s U.S. corn production to bioethanol, we could only replace only 6% of the year’s U.S. gasoline consumption.
• 35% of the earth’s ice-free land is already used for agriculture. Converting more land to agriculture means cutting down forests. This is already happening in Brazil, which is converting Amazon rain forest to sugar cane production for bioethanol.

Given the above, I cannot see any reason to devote resources to developing biofuels. We cannot afford to use land for growing biofuel crops, and biofuels are not a significant net generator of energy anyway. How can we bring this to the attention of the public and our politicians?

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In my last article, I wrote about poverty, especially among people who have jobs. Many of the workers living in poverty around the world are working in the clothing industry; most of the clothing available for sale in the US is produced in sweatshops (which we can define as places where basic worker rights are lacking or where the workers do not earn a wage that allows them to support themselves and their families). But there are alternatives. I researched them today and put together a new section on clothing on my personal web site’s Social Responsibility Page, if you are interested.

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