The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently voted unanimously to invite and help recent immigrants who were caught trying to enter America illegally. The Board wants to sponsor 200-300 needy immigrants each month. And to that end has also authorized the expenditure of $100,000 a month for two years to pay lawyers to represent our recent unauthorized arrivals. The City is already a sanctuary city allowing undocumented immigrants to live here without any fear of deportation and with every possible social service available to them. Our document-free immigrants are living here in the City by the Bay because of a policy that was created to aid refugees from El Salvador’s bloody scenes in the 1980’s, but just kept expanding to cover everyone here illegally.
San Francisco is also the home of more than 6,000 homeless. We are spending approximately $30,000 a year per homeless person (that equals $2,500 a month or $80+ a day) to house, feed and provide medical care for this needy population and still have half living in the streets and in our parks, relieving themselves wherever they can.
The City of St. Francis is known as the most liberal and generous city in the country and perhaps the world. Many of our residents are doing very well economically. We have more billionaires per capita and per square mile than any other city in the world. We can afford to pay our workers well, even those here without permission. Nannies, housekeepers, construction workers, landscapers and dog walkers make about $25-$30 an hour. Most of these workers pay no payroll or income tax and so net more than the average American does.
But San Franciscans are not the only Americans who want to help our new, uninvited guests. Many Americans realize how lucky we are to live here and bemoan the fact that so many people cannot live as we do. Many of us feel a a sense of noblesse oblige and want to help these unfortunate people whose only fault is being from a poor, corrupt, violent and unhealthy country. Some of us even don’t blame the leaders of these countries for their people’s poverty nor their culture or beliefs and practices. We choose to blame outside sources. Some of us want to blame America and other successful countries for these poor countries’ failures even though their problems go back hundreds of years. In any case, we want to help the helpless innocent.
For the past several years, tens of thousands of people have migrated from Central America to find a better life. We are told that these people live in poverty in countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador where the average wage is less than $1000 a year. They must pay $7000 to $10,000 to have a family member brought here the 1500 miles without invitation. We now have what is being called a “humanitarian crisis” resulting from a “broken immigration system.” What should be done with these tens of thousands of new interlopers? Can we send them back to suffer in their native lands? Can we help them here in our great land?
The United States of America is, without a doubt, the richest in the world. We have the largest gross domestic product, and annual budget. But we also have some problems. We have an accumulated federal debt of more than $17 trillion, adding half a trillion dollars in annual deficits each year. More than 10 million of our people are unemployed. Job seekers without a high school diploma make up a large share of our long term unemployed. Many of these applicants are Latino or black. (While we are never told who these unemployed are, there is a 40% unemployment rate among young blacks). They cannot find entry level jobs because many are taken by the eight million people already working here illegally.
Fifty million Americans live in poverty relying on the government for their basic needs, many are black or Latino.
But still we want to help the poor from other lands. There are more than three billion people living in abject poverty all over the world, including 2.5 billion living on less than $2 a day while America’s poor live on as little as $40 per day. In Latin America, there are more than 165 million living in desperate poverty (29% of the population), the vast majority would much rather live in America with its population of 320 million.
But America has only 53% of its 116 million households that can afford to pay any income tax at all, meaning that about 60 million families must pay for the needs of 320 million Americans and 10+ million illegal immigrants already living here. Can they also be asked to support the many new immigrants who lack the education, intellect and training to support themselves in this new land? If they stay, they become totally our responsibility for generations. We must educate them, treat their healthcare needs, find shelter for them as well as good paying jobs.
So what is the solution? Can we turn our backs on the tens of millions of Latin Americans who must suffer lives of poverty and violence in countries riddled with corruption? Can we accommodate these people in our rich country even if it means doing less for the poor Americans living in our country?
I think that the answer lies in the countries from which so many citizens want to leave. While I am against most of our foreign aid which too often goes to corrupt governments and makes even decent ones dependent upon our continued largesse, I believe that it is in our national and regional interest to help our neighbors to the south. The aid should not be in the form of weapons systems or money that usually goes to the powerful. The aid should be in the form of advisers. We should advise on education, which will be the foundation for future development in these underdeveloped nations. We should provide guidance for business development and management and for developing government systems to discourage fraud and corruption so rampant in these countries. We can help set up checks and balances in the various arms of government. And we can help educate the population on the merits and necessity of birth control. If you are too poor to feed yourself, you probably should not be having children.
PBS recently did a piece on the poverty in Central America by telling the story of one family. The mother was a woman who appeared to be about 60 very difficult years old. She had hardly any teeth and lived in squalor. She had six children who were malnourished causing them to be much smaller than normal and with diminished intellectual capacities. The youngest was less than a year old. As with all such reports, the reporter did not ask the obvious questions: why did this seemingly very old woman have six children and how could the youngest be a baby? The answer must be that the woman was not 60 but just a very old 50 and that she had kids she could not afford because someone had sex with her many times without benefit of contraception. If the poor in Central America could stop having children they could not feed, it would dramatically reduce poverty in that region.
If more Latin American governments could find ways to change their cultures and values, they could slowly work their way out of poverty. Brazil is doing that now in South America. Costa Rica and Panama are finding ways to change for the better in Central America. Mexico has also seen great improvement in living standards in the past 20 years. Countries like Guatemala and Honduras produce healthy food crops but are forced to export most of it leaving the people with diets of rice and beans. Women are treated badly by their men. The non-white populations, though in majority, are treated as second-class citizens with most of the leaders being of pure Spanish heritage. These are some of the areas where cultural changes are needed in Central and South America.
But it should not only be America who comes to the rescue of our southern neighbors. There are more than 190 other countries in our world, including the 34 Latin American countries that are joined in the Organization of American States. This organization should be instrumental in helping not only these tens of thousands of recent refugees to return to find safety in their own region, but aiding also all those who are suffering there now as well as helping the millions now living in the States without legal authority to return to their beloved homelands with reason to hope for a brighter future.
