As I walked near Farragut Square on Monday, I could have sworn that the warm breeze from the southwest was the accumulation of all the sighs of relief wafting from the State Department as administrators of the Summer Work Travel program discussed the story that aired on Friday night's PBS "NewsHour".
State — whose years of egregious mismanagement of the program have been chronicled by the GAO, its own inspector general, the Associated Press, the Economic Policy Institute, and by us at the Center for Immigration Studies — got off easy.
Even a reporter as accomplished as Paul Solman can do just so much with nine minutes of air time. So his story focused on the core question: Is the cultural exchange fostered by the SWT program worth the cost in job displacement for American workers?
So a serious journalistic probe of State's mismanagement of SWT and the rest of the sprawling, job-taking J-1 visa program must wait for another day. Meanwhile, however, those of us who want the program to serve the national interest rather than the interests of those who have milked it for hundreds of millions of dollars, can fantasize about how things should be at SWT. Here is my wish list.
1) There will be serious oversight of State's work from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which in recent years has shown all the watchdog vigor of a Foggy Bottom Bassett Hound on Vicodin.
2) The vigilant gods of transparency will descend upon the State Department. There they will instill the same love of open government and accountability that State Department officials preach with sanctimonious zeal to lesser countries around the world. Meanwhile, at home, State's public affairs officers mutter incomprehensible banalities about their inability to provide information about the operations of SWT. The liberating call will echo down the corridors: "Free the Information!"
3) State will put some teeth in the SWT regulatory regime that that has become infamous for its toothlessness, not to mention its listlessness, fecklessness, and general messiness. It will stop acting like a business partner and start acting like a regulator.
4) State, in a fit of candor, will disavow the nattering nonsense with which it continues to claim that American workers are not displaced by SWT workers. Such sophistry fools nobody. It merely confirms the worst stereotypes of a State Department elite so fixated on visa diplomacy abroad that it is blind to the realities of life at home.
5) State will ban the J-1 hustlers at the sponsoring organizations from taking their largest SWT employers/customers on free junkets to meet their future employees in Europe, Asia, and South Africa. Last year, CCI, the Chicago-based sponsoring agency, touted one of its executives by proclaiming that her "extensive experience in the radio and entertainment industries and in HR outsourcing ensures that the CCI J-1 Work and Travel program brings the world to the workplace." This is meretricious baloney. Let's put more Americans in the workplace by strictly controlling the size and the marketing of SWT. Let's make it a program of cultural exchange, rather than one of cheap labor and cheap foreign travel.
6) State will stop serving as the pusher for SWT employers/addicts in places like Ocean City, Md. As we documented in our report, the efforts of the local chamber of commerce to recruit Americans are ludicrously meager. They send out posters to colleges to announce the annual job fair. Meanwhile, the Ocean City Police Department, which has no access to SWT, sends recruiters to college campuses in a six-state area. State will require large users of SWT to hire at least 50 percent of their workers at home, encouraging them to make credible recruiting efforts in the United States before telling SWT to recruit around the world.
7) State will open its eyes to the sad irony of this recruiting pitch from one of its SWT sponsoring organizations: "Today's global markets require international work experience, and the value added by working in the USA is immeasurable to students from overseas." At a time of record youth unemployment, the value of working in the United States is also immeasurable for students from right here.
