Peru Hope

Three of the people we work with on a regular basis are building houses, “back home,” in the countries they come from. They are here in the United States to build a future for themselves, and their families. The jobs they work here are pretty low paying, but that is more than they would ever make staying in Central, or South America.

While here they live a better than average life style. Most of that can be attributed to a deep sense of community. It’s the same as when we travel to other countries. Every one we meet from ”back home” becomes a friend.

There is a lot of sharing, and caring in a stand offish kind of way. It’s a complicated culture that is both competitive, and collaborative at the same time. The one common theme is that these people traveled a long way to make a better life for themselves. It’s a powerful motivation.

In this next year we will be working toward building our community in a variety of ways. The first, and foremost, is helping people with the business that they have. Our second goal for this year is to consolidate more resources.

It seems to me that many people are spread out duplicating tasks. With some of the other web sites we set up this year our hope is that we can direct more interest to our community businesses. We’ll start with home services, and grow into the management of other business interests over the year.

We would like to develop affordable housing. This seems, here in Seattle, to be extremely hard to come by. In order to do that we would need to develop more financial services. We have a pronounced need for bookkeeping, and accounting. We need people who are interested in, and have the ability to, manage projects and people.

Like building a house we would like to lay the foundation for others future goals.

Over the Holiday Season I was chit chatting about our business year. It was a good year for us when, from what I understand, other businesses were struggling. This particular conversation touched on unemployment and I was surprised that the gentleman I was talking with brought up immigration. It was a passing comment about immigration adding to the unemployment problem.

I gave him one of those sideways looks and he was a little sheepish. He is after all a dyed in the wool conservative, but still, no one blames immigration any more. With all the goods coming from China we should be grateful to find factory workers who can help us compete. I could go off on a tangent about Unions and Union shops that hold the membership to a certain standard while making concessions that undermine the bidding process.

It has made very little sense to me that we expect manufacturing to remain outside of our borders by not allowing a full range of workers. We talk about Chinese sweat shops, but we prefer to have those goods here in the United States rather than have those workers here, working in our plants, paying taxes in our system, and shipping by our freight.

There are a series of manufacturing plants on the other side of the border in Mexico who don’t have the restrictions of EPA standards. You can see the plants from the United States. They’re right there across the river. How could any regulator think that those pollutants are going to stay on the Mexico side of the border? How did all of the Unions, and government agencies oppose NAFTA while we lost the jobs we were trying to protect?

There is a new study from the Center for American Progress that a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration laws would increase the country’s gross domestic product by $1.5 trillion over a decade.

The $1.5 trillion figure is reached by a calculation that an immigration overhaul would increase U.S. GDP by 0.84% annually.

Of course if you look at the numbers by themselves it makes the assumption that the wages earned here, would stay here, in the United States. They don’t, they are funnelled back to the countries where workers come from, where the families live.

Opening our borders with both Canada, and Mexico, makes sense. If we are capitalists then it will be the survival of the fittest. We are a right to work country. We will prevail because we are the best at what we do, and anything else is an excuse.