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HRC's Last Paid Speech: $260K in her bank acct: ACA and the J-1 Visas--Displaces American Workers
HRC's Last Paid Speech before the ACA was anything but benign.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/24/1489983/-HRC-s-Final-Paid-Speech-260K-from-the-ACA
Bernie Sanders condemned the J-1 Visa system
The American Camp Association is a national non-profit 501c3 that has 10,000 members and three regional affiliates that represent 2,500 summer and day camps throughout the U.S. It provides professional development and educational opportunities for the camp industry and among its top public-policy priorities lobbies for the Camp Counselor[3] and Student Work Travel (SWT) [4] categories of the J-1 visa program administered by the U.S. State Department.
State Department J-1 Visa Program Advocacy
According to the ACA’s own advocacy materials, 25,000 individuals were placed in ACA camps through the State Department’s Exchange Visitor Program in 2011– 20,000 from the specific Camp Counselor category; and 5,000 from the SWT category. Both categories of student workers are facilitated by a network of 49 State Department-approved “sponsors”. In effect, these are staffing agencies that work with feeder organizations in dozens of countries that recruit international students and workers to come to the U.S. for a four-month cultural/work experience.
The SWT program grew dramatically – from 20,000 participants in the early 1990s to a peak of 153,000 workers in 2008. It is currently capped at 109,000 workers after public outrage over widespread abuses of working conditions, accommodation, compensation and a non-existent cultural component.
Participants pay significant fees to the sponsoring agencies ($1100 to $2000) in the hope they will experience America and make some money while they are here. In reality, the experience is often far removed from the exciting marketing materials on sponsor web sites. Sixty to eighty-hour weeks of making beds, flipping burgers, working the night shift and sleeping four, six or eight to a room in poor accommodations for minimum wage are all too common.
Employers in such resort towns as Ocean City, Maryland, employ thousands of these SWT workers for a variety of reasons divorced from any notion of cultural exchange. For starters, they save 8 per cent over the cost of employing domestic workers because they don’t have to contribute to Social Security, Medicare or Federal Unemployment Insurance.
The Camp Counselor program which the ACA fully embraces, offers similar advantages to employers. State Department rule changes in 2012 sought to draw a clearer distinction between counselors and SWT staff roles but tremendous ambiguity and virtually non-existent enforcement remain.
Those sponsoring agencies that do present an accurate picture of the job explain that counselors work 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week during a nine-week camp placement. Sponsoring agencies describe compensation as a stipend[5] and an ACA 2013 FAQ as “pocket money”[6]. Even using the high end of the stipend range ($1800), you get abysmal compensation: $1800 for nine 72-hour weeks, works out to $2.77 an hour.
Undoubtedly there are some cultural benefits for young campers exposed to international counselors, but it would be naive to think that the obvious financial incentives for the camp owners are not front and center in the decision to hire staff from abroad. For argument’s sake, if we simply distributed the 20,000 counselors and 5,000 SWTs that the ACA claimed were employed in its 2,500 camps during 2011, each camp would have employed eight J-1 visa counselors and two J-1 visa SWT workers. In other words, the camp industry relies heavily on this cheaper international labor force.
Major Problems with the J-1 Labor Pipeline
In 2014, The Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) presented a report titled Culture Shock: The Exploitation of J-1 Cultural Exchange Workers,[7] which argued
“The undeniable conclusion is that these J-1 programs, an initiative once envisioned as a tool of diplomacy, has become little more than a source of cheap labor for employers.”
Bernie Sanders, during debate on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill S.744 , called the program “a scam.”
“It is not a cultural-exchange program,” he said. “It is displacing young American workers at a time of double-digit unemployment among young people, and it is putting downward pressure on wages at a time when the American people are working longer hours for lower wages.” [8]
In response, the ACA lobbied to keep the program alive. Quoting from its 2014 annual report, it argued that the ”ACA successfully mobilized the community to advocate for the continuation of the government program that allows for international visitors to serve as camp staff, thereby providing amazing cultural exchange programs for American kids and foreign nationals. This program was at risk during the Congressional debates regarding immigration reform.[9]”
Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, summed up the disastrous state of the program exactly one year to the day before former secretary of state Clinton delivered her American Camp Association speech.[10]
“It’s now clear to almost everyone that the Summer Work Travel Program is in dire straits - and it’s a black eye on our immigration system. And because the noble goal of facilitating cultural exchanges will NOT be negatively affected if the program is shrunk dramatically or even eliminated, it’s time for President Obama and Congress to direct the State Department to suspend and fix the SWT program immediately. If State fails to act, Congress should eliminate SWT altogether.
Placing a $260,000 Bet on Favorable Executive Action
Consider the final paragraph, on the final page of the ACA’s FY2014 financial disclosures (New York Section), which I might add are not available currently on the ACA NYNJ site (as of 2/21/2016). It took some digging to find the information on charitiesnys.com.
Returning then to my original question: Why does a non-profit spend 10 per cent of its annual budget, ten times what it would normally pay for a keynote speaker,[12] increase its annual total expense line item for “speaker presentations” from $102,784 to $350,619 for a high-profile politician and present her to an audience probably split in its political loyalties?
The answer is obvious. It was a strategic calculation on the association’s part to secure future consideration for the J-1 visa programs the industry relies on. As a near-term-future president the former Secretary of State would have tremendous discretion in rule-making given both her familiarity with the subject and the likelihood that immigration reform in a partisan Washington may be achievable only through piecemeal executive action.
State Department J-1 Visa Program Advocacy
According to the ACA’s own advocacy materials, 25,000 individuals were placed in ACA camps through the State Department’s Exchange Visitor Program in 2011– 20,000 from the specific Camp Counselor category; and 5,000 from the SWT category. Both categories of student workers are facilitated by a network of 49 State Department-approved “sponsors”. In effect, these are staffing agencies that work with feeder organizations in dozens of countries that recruit international students and workers to come to the U.S. for a four-month cultural/work experience.
The SWT program grew dramatically – from 20,000 participants in the early 1990s to a peak of 153,000 workers in 2008. It is currently capped at 109,000 workers after public outrage over widespread abuses of working conditions, accommodation, compensation and a non-existent cultural component.
Participants pay significant fees to the sponsoring agencies ($1100 to $2000) in the hope they will experience America and make some money while they are here. In reality, the experience is often far removed from the exciting marketing materials on sponsor web sites. Sixty to eighty-hour weeks of making beds, flipping burgers, working the night shift and sleeping four, six or eight to a room in poor accommodations for minimum wage are all too common.
Employers in such resort towns as Ocean City, Maryland, employ thousands of these SWT workers for a variety of reasons divorced from any notion of cultural exchange. For starters, they save 8 per cent over the cost of employing domestic workers because they don’t have to contribute to Social Security, Medicare or Federal Unemployment Insurance.
The Camp Counselor program which the ACA fully embraces, offers similar advantages to employers. State Department rule changes in 2012 sought to draw a clearer distinction between counselors and SWT staff roles but tremendous ambiguity and virtually non-existent enforcement remain.
Those sponsoring agencies that do present an accurate picture of the job explain that counselors work 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week during a nine-week camp placement. Sponsoring agencies describe compensation as a stipend[5] and an ACA 2013 FAQ as “pocket money”[6]. Even using the high end of the stipend range ($1800), you get abysmal compensation: $1800 for nine 72-hour weeks, works out to $2.77 an hour.
Undoubtedly there are some cultural benefits for young campers exposed to international counselors, but it would be naive to think that the obvious financial incentives for the camp owners are not front and center in the decision to hire staff from abroad. For argument’s sake, if we simply distributed the 20,000 counselors and 5,000 SWTs that the ACA claimed were employed in its 2,500 camps during 2011, each camp would have employed eight J-1 visa counselors and two J-1 visa SWT workers. In other words, the camp industry relies heavily on this cheaper international labor force.
Major Problems with the J-1 Labor Pipeline
In 2014, The Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) presented a report titled Culture Shock: The Exploitation of J-1 Cultural Exchange Workers,[7] which argued
“The undeniable conclusion is that these J-1 programs, an initiative once envisioned as a tool of diplomacy, has become little more than a source of cheap labor for employers.”
Bernie Sanders, during debate on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill S.744 , called the program “a scam.”
“It is not a cultural-exchange program,” he said. “It is displacing young American workers at a time of double-digit unemployment among young people, and it is putting downward pressure on wages at a time when the American people are working longer hours for lower wages.” [8]
In response, the ACA lobbied to keep the program alive. Quoting from its 2014 annual report, it argued that the ”ACA successfully mobilized the community to advocate for the continuation of the government program that allows for international visitors to serve as camp staff, thereby providing amazing cultural exchange programs for American kids and foreign nationals. This program was at risk during the Congressional debates regarding immigration reform.[9]”
Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, summed up the disastrous state of the program exactly one year to the day before former secretary of state Clinton delivered her American Camp Association speech.[10]
“It’s now clear to almost everyone that the Summer Work Travel Program is in dire straits - and it’s a black eye on our immigration system. And because the noble goal of facilitating cultural exchanges will NOT be negatively affected if the program is shrunk dramatically or even eliminated, it’s time for President Obama and Congress to direct the State Department to suspend and fix the SWT program immediately. If State fails to act, Congress should eliminate SWT altogether.
Placing a $260,000 Bet on Favorable Executive Action
Consider the final paragraph, on the final page of the ACA’s FY2014 financial disclosures (New York Section), which I might add are not available currently on the ACA NYNJ site (as of 2/21/2016). It took some digging to find the information on charitiesnys.com.
“For the March 2015 Tri-State Camping Conference, the Organization hired a high-profile politician as a guest speaker, which resulted in an additional cost of $260,000. This was a one-time expense and such expenses are not expected to occur in the subsequent year.”[11]
Returning then to my original question: Why does a non-profit spend 10 per cent of its annual budget, ten times what it would normally pay for a keynote speaker,[12] increase its annual total expense line item for “speaker presentations” from $102,784 to $350,619 for a high-profile politician and present her to an audience probably split in its political loyalties?
The answer is obvious. It was a strategic calculation on the association’s part to secure future consideration for the J-1 visa programs the industry relies on. As a near-term-future president the former Secretary of State would have tremendous discretion in rule-making given both her familiarity with the subject and the likelihood that immigration reform in a partisan Washington may be achievable only through piecemeal executive action.
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