Operation Blooming Onion

 I had some other ideas percolating, but saw a video I wanted to discuss in more detail first.

A long time ago, I was a young junior officer sent to Iraq. What some of you may not know is that there was this push for privatization, to the point where we had big defense contractors who took on jobs - like hiring cooks in the dining facility - that used to be done by US soldiers. While you can have a very long discussion on that, and whether it's a good idea or not, that's not what this post is about.

Rather, I wanted to talk about how so many of those cooks came from third world countries. The business logic is obvious - if you get a defense contract for a ton of money, but you hire workers who see a low wage (like $5/hr) as good pay, then you can pocket the rest.

You can even, maybe, find workers willing to work for less. For example, at one point the contractors were primarily from the Phillipines or other such places, then the next day there were was some sort of change and most of them were from the Congo.

My contract job in Iraq after I left the military was primarily about vetting such third country nationals. Trying to find reports that might refer to them, so I could identify security risks.

There was always a concern about an 'insider threat', especially in Afghanistan. Though that primarily referred to our local allies rather than the third country nationals. Still, there was a risk there, too.

I don't remember exactly where or when I learned about what I'll discuss next. I primarily heard about it more as illegal activity we (rightly) tried to stop when we discovered it, but the thing is that workers like this are vulnerable.

You bring them to a foreign country, to a place where they don't know anybody and don't know the language, and if you're particularly an asshole you can confiscate their passport and hold them in bad conditions and they don't exactly have a lot of options.

I have learned about that happening in other places, too. Saudi Arabia, for example, with all that oil money flowing - hires third country  nationals to do all the grunt work they don't want to. 

And those workers are also vulnerable, and you can easily find similar stories.

At some point I got curious about some bigger picture things. Anti-terrorism, of course. But terrorists often make their money illegally, which got me looking into organized crime. And modern slavery wasn't too far of a stretch from that.

And so I learned of Brazilian charcoal makers. Of workers brought to a remote site to produce charcoal, except then they are told they owe money for the transportation. And of course for the food and sleeping places they require, and it's again in a remote place where they'd have to trek through jungle if they ran away, and it's a system ripe for exploitation and abuse.

Or brickmakers, I think in India, where the 'debt' that they are never paid well enough to clear, is passed on to their children. Children born into debt for something they never really benefited from, who are not taught math and don't really know enough to realize how predatory the system they're born into is. Even if they seem to be able to do well - for a time - there is always some crisis or need that drives them further into debt.

A health issue, one that requires medicine. Their employers/creditors might loan them money to get through the emergency, but if you try to leave or find something better suddenly that debt is called in. All at once.

It functions kind of like Company Towns, and the company grocery store, which has a bad reputation for very good reason.

This isn't just something that happens in remote places like Brazil or India, either. Nor is it always trans-national crime, like the story of the scam center in Indonesia. 

Workers in situations like this are, again, vulnerable. They might even wind up conscripted to fight for Russia (which, frankly, if Russia has to go to this length to 'win' they should just accept that they have lost. If you can't carry on your nation's fight with your own people then you're basically a zombie and should be put out of your misery). 

Even that isn't the whole of it, though. Sometimes the exact same systems appear much closer to home. Like the recent human trafficking case in our own state of Georgia. 

The reason I posted about this is because I saw a video talking about that, and it added another layer to what the politics of undocumented immigrants is all about.

Let's step back for a minute though. Because I wanted to talk about something else I've seen. I work in the tech industry, and there are a number of highly educated workers who immigrate here for jobs on one of those visas. H1 I think? Our immigration is complex and a real pain to navigate (almost like they're trying to make it difficult or something. Oh wait...)

And for workers like this, losing their sponsorship is a huge concern. If they want to stay in the US they have to have a sponsor, which means it's not very easy for them to just quite a company when the work environment is bad. They always have to have something else lined up, or they risk being deported.

It's one thing when we're talking about highly educated individuals who are well-payed and who work in urban environments.

What this video shows, though, is that that same dynamic is in play with documented agricultural workers. Ones who are often not well-educated, aren't paid as well, and are often working in remote rural areas. Like farms.

The part that was new to me, then, was that apparently undocumented immigrants had a much easier time of leaving crappy work environments. And that the push to hire them as H2 (? I can't remember the exact form, but it's a different type of work visa than the tech workers have) is essentially a way of locking them in and controlling them.

Like those immigrants with their passports confiscated, stuck in inhuman and abusive situations, with no way out.

That in some ways the war on undocumented individuals is also about trying to gain control.

And this is the part that really sticks in my craw.

Because while of course I, like others, prefer low grocery prices and cheap food, I don't want it built on such a horrible system.

I don't want it to be done by exploiting people and forcing them to work in abusive and crappy situations.

I get, sometimes, why people just want to tear the whole thing down. 

We should be valuing our people, paying them well, and if that means higher grocery prices then the people buying those groceries should be paid well enough to afford it.

And you all know what economists say will happen next. That doing so would just cause inflation, and prices would rise everywhere, and we'd all be stuck in basically the same situation.

But... that's only the case if businesses keep raising prices in order to keep their profits. 

If they're reporting a record year in earnings, then it's clear that some of that profit could have gone towards making a more sustainable system.

They just don't want to. (And then they wonder why socialism is appealing to so many people, or why 'eat the rich' is a slogan, or why there is such dissatisfaction and disgruntlement.)

I think we all know this, it's the tension underlying so many of our issues today. 

I just don't know how we can fix it when the people benefiting from it are using every resource at their disposal to prevent exactly that.

And so we stagnate. So we ossify. So the system breaks down. 

And we keep wondering what straw is going to break the camel's back.