HodgBlog

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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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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I started this blog mostly so that I could do some research into US foreign aid and report the results, which I have been doing. But I haven’t written an article lately, and I realized that the reason was that I had really come to the conclusion that the Program Our Government Calls “Foreign Aid” (POGCFA for short) has very little to do with what you would think from its name: helping foreign countries. Instead, the POGCFA is mostly just a US corporate welfare program. So, analyzing what it is and isn’t doing well in the area of foreign aid seems to be rather pointless, and I am going to give up doing further analysis of the POGCFA and concentrate on other subjects. But before I do, here is a summary of why I think the POGCFA is not a real foreign aid program, based on my previous articles and the information sources cited by them:

• A real foreign aid program would analyze humanitarian need and send aid to the countries where the need is greatest, designated for humanitarian purposes (food, water, health care, education). But as I’ve reported in previous articles, the POGCFA does not give the most aid to the countries generally recognized to have the greatest level of humanitarian need. Also, the POGCFA spends a lot of the money it calls foreign aid on the military, drug enforcement, and economic “development” aimed at preparing foreign countries to trade beneficially with US companies, rather than for humanitarian purposes.
• A real foreign aid program would be providing aid either directly to foreign governments or better yet to humanitarian non-governmental organizations based in the countries, because they would presumably be in the best position to know what their country needs. It would also use local labor, local management, and local methods to complete projects in foreign countries, in order to provide much-needed employment, make sure most of the aid money stays in the foreign country, spend money efficiently (salaries are lower), draw upon local knowledge, and respect local cultures. However, the POGCFA is currently giving most of its aid money to for-profit companies based in the US, who conduct the projects with US personnel, so much of the money comes back into the US economy.
• A real foreign aid proram would give grants of money, and if interested in loans, concentrate on micro-credit going directly to small entrepreneurs. Instead, the POGCFA promotes large loans to foreign governments, which are terrible for the countries in the long run and provide little benefit to the average person there in the short term (see this article on loans for more information).
• A real foreign aid program would avoid getting involved in foreign politics and the governing of foreign countries. But the POGCFA demands that foreign governments accept its economic policies, supports foreign political and military groups that are willing to work for its agenda, distributes propaganda, assasinates political leaders, and in some cases simply goes into a foreign country and openly and directly takes over.

So I guess that rather than campaigning to change the current US foreign aid program, we ought to campaign to eliminate the POGCFA, and start over with a real foreign aid program based on needs, and aimed at actually helping foreign countries. What a concept!

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In my earlier Where We Send Money post, I collected some facts about where the US government is sending aid, but didn’t say too much about those facts. Here are a few thoughts.

USAID says that we are sending out foreign aid in order to further US policy interests and improve the lives of people in the developing world. However, the effect (and I believe the intention) of much of our foreign aid is really to subjugate developing countries to US business interests. There’s much more on this subject in the excellent book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In this book, John Perkins describes how he and others created totally fake economic analyses and used covert threats to convince developing countries to accept loans from the US. They spent the money hiring US companies to build unnecessary infrastructure, and the countries ended up with these “improvements” in exchange for large quantities of debt. The vast majority of very poor people in these countries received no benefit at all from the “aid”, and became even worse off when their governments were later forced to adopt new policies (such as cutting budgets for education and public health care) in order to put more money into paying off their debts.

I do not want to say that none of our foreign aid is going towards helping people — certainly, if we send food to hungry people in Africa, some of the food will likely go to people who would otherwise have nothing to eat. However, I believe that not much of the foreign aid money is actually helping people, and that this trend needs to be reversed.

So, I will continue with my research and see if I can more fully substantiate my beliefs. Stay tuned!

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