VICE (2013) s03e07 Episode Script

Shane Smith: This week on Vice, Alabama throws out its illegal immigrants.
White people in this area don't wanna work.
They couldn't hack it.
Smith: And then, billions of dollars down the drain in Haiti.
Alabama passed one of the most harsh pieces of anti-immigrant legislation in the country, and most immigrants left.
This was supposed to be temporary, but very soon it became permanent.
Illegal immigration is one of the most controversial issues in American politics.
In the fall of 2014, President Obama signed an executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Which, in turn, has inflamed the debate.
Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law? His opponents want the executive order overturned and to pass even stricter laws that would make it so difficult for the undocumented that they simply have to return back to the countries that they come from.
The president's executive amnesty is lawless and unconstitutional.
As it turns out, in 2011, Alabama already tried this, passing one of the toughest immigration laws in the nation's history.
So we sent Thomas Morton to Alabama to see what happens when illegal immigrants are actually forced out.
(rock music plays) So how does this work? You just Whoa! Now I'm starting to get nervous.
Yeah.
Damn it.
Oops! Oh! These are big.
(Morton exhales) Maybe kind of.
What? A little.
Wow, how much does this weigh? (laughs) You able to get that? That thing was like 70 pounds.
No joke.
(laughs) (acoustic guitar plays) Morton: This job sucks.
Which is why it's being done by immigrants.
Some here legally, some illegally.
But all to a person from Central and South America.
Same as the Latinos we let do all the harshest, most underpaid labor across this country.
Except in one state.
Hi, it's Thomas.
I'm in a, uh, a quasi-derelict trailer park in Albertville, Alabama.
Until a couple of years ago, this trailer park was populated exclusively by Latino immigrants.
Then Alabama passed one of the most harsh pieces of anti-immigrant legislation in the country.
And most immigrants left.
I think a lot of them left because, uh, they said that cops were gonna have the power to pull people over, just because they were brown and stuff like that.
They weren't gonna harbor people anymore, so a lot of people got scared.
Morton: The law she's talking about is Alabama House Bill 56, which was passed in 2011 after a landslide vote in 'Bama's house and senate.
The bill didn't just target illegal immigrants.
It went after any citizen who helped "shield or harbor" illegal immigrants.
It effectively criminalized interacting with illegal immigrants at all.
And since Latinos made up the overwhelming bulk of the state's immigrant population, they felt the overwhelming weight of the law's enforcement.
HB 56 not only gave police the authority to stop anybody they suspected of being in the country illegally, it actually required them to do so.
While some police departments balked at this enormous expansion of their responsibilities, others, like Albertville's, took up the new law with full gusto.
You've been in Albertville your whole life.
How long has there been a Hispanic population here? Morton: And that's what Alabama's congress set out to do.
Mike Ball voted for HB 56.
He's a state congressman from Alabama's If you have laws, you ought to enforce them.
A lot of people in Alabama was seeing this influx of illegal immigrants, and they wanted something done about it.
Our unemployment rate had begun to increase drastically and the very people that were needing to work the most were the ones that seemed to be getting flooded out by that flux of, uh, of illegal immigrants.
Morton: The bill wasn't just aimed at securing Alabaman jobs.
Clamping down on immigration was also pitched as a matter of state security.
Do you think that, uh, that ties in with the immigrant population? Yeah.
Morton: Crime wasn't the only area where the bill's results fell short of expectations.
Female reporter: On the farm fields of Alabama the verdict is in: the state's tough immigration law just isn't working out.
This potato farmer hired Americans.
Problem is he says most show up late, work slower, and are ready to head home after lunch.
Male reporter: Agriculture in Alabama could be headed the way of its immigrant workforce.
When a lot of these people left, we couldn't replace them fast enough.
Typically, we couldn't replace them at all.
Morton: Dr.
Samuel Addy is an economist at the University of Alabama.
As the tide of immigrant labor began rolling out of state, Dr.
Addy crunched the numbers to predict the financial effect this exodus could ultimately have.
Given how draconian the law was, what you get for Alabama is actually a shrinking of our GDP by about 2.
3 to 10.
8 billion in one year.
There wasn't any one big factor that you can point to to cause this decline.
Yeah.
Except for this law.
Immigrants are largely complements to the economic structure.
The unskilled labor do jobs that we don't do.
Morton: While the outflux of migrant workers was exactly what the law was supposed to do, Alabama's farmers quickly discovered that the workforce the law kicked out wasn't fully compatible with the workforce that was supposed to replace it.
This may make people mad, but white people in this area, uh, don't wanna work.
Catching chickens is a back-breaking job.
White people, they gripe and complain all the time.
You can take one Hispanic catching chickens, and one white guy, the Hispanic will catch five times more chickens than he will.
We have to have the migrants in the farming industry.
That's not a big no-brainer to figure out.
Morton: This racial ability gap wasn't exclusive to chicken grabbing.
To replace his own exiled migrants, produce farmer Jerry Spencer used Facebook to recruit new field hands from Birmingham's jobless poor.
They came from the soup kitchens, they came from the streets, they came from the halfway houses, they came from all over the place.
And I turned it into a 30-day experiment.
What did you see, kind of, as it progressed? They couldn't hack it.
Just the sheer physicality of it.
The Hispanics, they'll do a whole truck of tomatoes, 200 or 300 boxes of tomatoes in a day themselves.
I don't know of American non-Hispanic that would do that.
Morton: Jesse Durr took part in Spencer's tomato experiment.
He was the only one that lasted the full 30 days in the field.
Though, as you may have guessed, he did not stick with farming in the end.
Morton: What they did do was take a page from state history and reestablish the vaunted Southern tradition of the prison chain gang, although this time without the chains.
So, the prison crew's out.
Everybody seems pretty psyched about (man shouts) being out and doing some work in the sun.
Especially psyched about being able to smoke.
Need a lighter? How you guys doing? Men: Hey.
So you guys' first time out, uh, doing farm work? Well, we're gonna go to the field, we're gonna plant the stuff today.
Some of these boys gonna be walking behind the tractor to make sure the seed's in the ground.
I got plenty of labor today, huh? I need y'all over here to put some fertilizer! Morton: Basically, what we're doing is following the tractor and looking for, uh, seeds that the planter on the back of the tractor hasn't put far enough in the-- in the dirt.
Morton: While George was too busy driving the tractor to keep watch over the prison detail's work, his wife Sylvia was unimpressed with their efforts.
Okay.
Morton: Sylvia seems a little bit dismayed that they're not paying as much attention.
You can definitely see some leftover seed here that probably should have some dirt on it.
How are the, uh, prisoners working out? Honestly, they are not filling my expectations.
They just wanna play around, they just wanna smoke.
We need somebody to help us.
(barking) So the watermelons we planted a few months ago are now actual melons.
The prison labor that George and Sylvia, the farmers here, were using didn't really work out for them.
They had to go back and basically redo everything they had done.
There aren't too many people they can call on, so they've called up family members, a few hours away.
It's sort of slim pickings in terms of farmhands.
Morton: Due to its overwhelming failure, Alabama's lawmakers have been quietly dismantling HB 56.
The lasting damage, however, may be to Alabama's reputation among Latino migrants, whose return to the state's labor pool has undershot their departure.
So we're gonna go join the line.
Morton: Despite all the hubbub, farmers like George and Sylvia are basically back where they started, with a field crew of immigrants, just a lot less of them.
It's like playing an endless game of egg toss.
(grunts) Hm? Morton: Obviously, it doesn't get too much worse than melon farming, and the problem with all the jobs that illegal immigrants have filled here in Alabama and the rest of the country isn't so much that they're jobs that no one will do, they're jobs that no one will do for the amount of money that immigrants will accept.
It's a lose-lose situation for both the people trying to compete for those jobs and get a decent wage who get shut out by the immigrants who take lower wages, and for the immigrants whose wages are terrible and have to put up with horrible working conditions, and don't have anybody that they can turn to when they're harassed or oppressed or whatever.
As a result of that, you know, we can buy $7 melons at Walmart, but But what? I like $7 melons.
Look, no one gives a shit when they're tired and they hit the Holiday Inn and they see Maria, whether she has papers or not.
Morton: Luis Gutierrez, the US representative who has built his career on Latino rights and bridging the seemingly intractable divide between the public's reliance on illegal immigrant labor and their attitudes towards illegal immigrants themselves.
Undocumented workers, they are here to service our nation, and to do work which is valuable and essential.
But look, when politicians do not have an answer to your social, economic needs, then they blame someone and say, "Let's all get together against them.
Reelect me.
" Morton: And what makes illegal immigrants the perfect political scapegoat is they can't vote in retaliation.
Gutierrez: Politicians understand who does the work.
They understand what they provide to the economy.
You gotta be blind not to see it.
Last year, Vice visited Haiti to report on the massive deforestation of the country to fuel the black market charcoal business.
Our reporters, while they were there, were shocked at how devastated Haiti still looked five years after the earthquake.
Almost ten billion dollars in relief aid had been pledged from around the world, yet many parts of Port-au-Prince still look the earthquake struck just yesterday.
So we sent Vikram Gandhi back to Haiti to see how one of the world's largest ever relief efforts could fall so far short.
(thunder crashes) Gandhi: When a 7.
0 earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, an estimated 316,000 people were killed, and another two million were forced from their homes.
When disasters like this strike, the natural human impulse is to want to help.
But even after billions of dollars in foreign aid, five years later, hundreds of thousands of survivors are still displaced.
At Delmas 33, their camp coordinator gave us a look at their living conditions.
This is a tent city that's been in effect for the last four and a half years.
And we're gonna check out what it's like to be a refugee of the earthquake.
So, what are these homes made of? Gandhi: Does anybody have electricity, plumbing, or running water here? When you moved here, how long did you think you were gonna stay? Gandhi: Worse than ten billion dollars of aid not providing these survivors with long-term housing, electricity or drinkable water, it didn't even provide them with a functioning toilet.
This is the reality of Haitian sanitation.
So, inevitably, human waste gets into the water supply.
This is not just disgusting, it's potentially deadly.
In fact, a year after the earthquake, Haiti suffered the world's largest modern outbreak of cholera.
It was actually brought there by UN foreign relief workers whose waste contaminated local water supplies.
With 700,000 people infected, and nearly 9,000 deaths, we learned from Dr.
Jean Pape that new cases of this easily preventable infection are still popping up.
What's the relationship of choler spreading and the lack of sanitation? Oh, it's it's huge.
Essentially in a place where you don't have adequate latrines, where people don't have water to wash their hands, it's going to spread like wildfire like it did here.
Gandhi: With the long-term relief aid in Port-au-Prince appearing to be completely squandered, we spoke to Jake Johnston, whose five-year investigation into Haiti relief funds has made him the premier economic researcher on following the money trail.
After the earthquake, millions of Americans started donating to help Haiti.
Where did all that money go? You know, in terms of private donations, most of it goes to emergency response, clearing rubble, clean water, some basic health, food aid.
The long term or development aid, that comes mostly from the donor governments.
The US government, the leaders of the development banks, all had the slogan: "Build back better.
" This was supposed to be different.
This was the opportunity with ten billion dollars on the table.
The big question that's been on everyone's mind is where did the money go? And I think that's when we enter this sort of black box.
Congress appropriates money to USAID.
And then USAID contracts other organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, that actually implement the programs on the ground.
For every dollar that USAID spends, less than a penny actually goes directly to any Haitian organization, Haitian company, Haitian government.
Rather than giving money to local companies, things were imported.
So we imported cement, we imported the foreign experts, we imported the construction companies to actually build them.
Right after the earthquake, they had an ambitious housing program.
So they had planned to build about 15,000 houses, cost about 53 million dollars.
The cost ballooned to 93 million dollars.
And instead of 15,000 houses, there would be 2,600 houses.
At the same time, the US Embassy gave a contract for over 70 million dollars to build townhouses with pools for their own staff.
That's that fundamental divide between what we think of as aid and helping those in need, and how our system actually works.
Gandhi: And while we built plenty of homes for our own people, we didn't see to build many for the survivors who needed them.
That's because of plans like the Zoranje housing expo, which was one of the first approved reconstruction projects headed by Bill Clinton and the interim Haiti Recovery Commission.
The basic idea of Zoranje is a 2.
4 million dollar showroom.
International firms competed to sell their prototypes with the hopes of winning a contract for mass production.
So behind me are model homes.
None of them have any plumbing, electricity or running water.
But what happened after the expo is people moved in, they occupied this property, and now it's become a fully functioning town.
Camille Chalmers, an affordable housing activist, gave us some insight on how viable the houses actually were.
This seems like a log cabin you might find, like, by Yellowstone National Park.
Did you think there was ever a chance that these were gonna be built in Haiti? What do you make of this one? This is one of my personal favorites.
That looks like something from, like, Martha's Vineyard.
Are you telling me that they didn't talk to people from Haiti before they came here to try to sell these houses? That house, that's some hippie shit right there.
(laughs) (both laugh) How many homes were actually built for Haitians based on any of these model homes? Gandhi: So not only were no real homes built, but the survivors are left in the same primitive conditions as the refugee camps, squatting in a permanent reminder of what our aid intended to give them.
But this squat is nothing compared to what we saw in the mountains of Canaan.
With limited options in the city, survivors began building their own homes in this formerly barren land.
Now, what began as a refugee camp, is so big that if recognized it would qualify as one of Haiti's largest cities.
So this place has all been built up in the last four years.
This was supposed to be temporary, but very soon it became permanent.
And as we learned from community organizer Reynel Sanon, these people were left to fend for themselves.
Gandhi: What's odd is that the Haitians who received little to no foreign aid actually seemed to be doing better than those in the designated relief areas.
Did you build this house? Did you get any help from the government or any NGOs? Gandhi: These people too lack simple amenities like toilets and clean drinking water.
And to make matters worse for the squatters, the Haitian government has cracked down on land rights, leading to constant disputes and forced evictions.
Gandhi: But there was one permanent structure that was built here for the earthquake survivors.
For some reason, the International Olympic Committee thought that these people could use an 18 million dollar state-of-the-art soccer field and recreation center, adding insult to injury, in a community lacking even the most basic amenities.
Gandhi: But this wasn't the only strange reconstruction project we saw foreign aid invested in.
Seven hours north of the earthquake, over 300 million dollars of foreign aid was spent in the district of Caracol.
So we've learned that a lot of the earthquake aid money came to Caracol.
Um, where was this town affected by the earthquake? Gandhi: But even though the town wasn't affected, it didn't stop our government aid from being invested in another soccer field.
Even for the things that made sense, the price tag didn't seem to match the product.
How much did this cost to build? Gandhi: And when we checked, the State Department actually spent 2.
3 million dollars.
But it was still hard to understand how it could cost so much.
And when we looked at the costs of many other projects, we noticed the same contractor kept coming up.
Chemonics is the largest USAID recipient across the world.
Chemonics actually got their big break in Afghanistan.
Chemonics was one of the largest recipients of that pool of money as well.
Since that point, there's been a number of audits that have showed lack of progress, a lack of oversight.
Here, this is the contract of Chemonics with USAID.
All the cost information throughout the contract, that's all redacted, and we just have pink sheet after pink sheet.
In fact, 25 pink sheets.
Gandhi: And once again, no one bothered to ask the locals what they needed.
When Chemonics comes here to build things, how do they consult with you and the other people who live here? So what's this place? Does everybody have running water, flush toilets and plumbing? As the mayor, would you have rather had plumbing and running water, as opposed to the cultural center and the football park? Gandhi: So we built them an overpriced police station, another soccer field and a cultural center we couldn't even get into.
But we soon found out the real reason that towns so far from the actual disaster would get so much aid.
USAID's real investment here is the more than 260 million dollars spent for the Caracol industrial park, the largest US development project in the aftermath of the earthquake.
So if you look around this whole place, doesn't even look like Haiti.
It looks like America.
I mean, there's paved streets, there's sidewalks, there's electricity, and there's drinkable running water, which is actually unheard of in Haiti.
Unfortunately, it only provides roughly ten percent of the jobs it promised.
And its main tenant is a South Korean garment manufacturing company, which enjoys cheap labor, tax exemptions, and duty-free access to the US market.
Worst of all, none of the employees we met were earthquake survivors, and the plan for the park was drawn up before the disaster even happened.
USAID declined a request for an interview.
We were, however, able to talk to USAID's former deputy director, Diana Ohlbaum, about the issues that plague our aid system.
In a case like Haiti, I think there are few things that prevent USAID from doing the things it would like to do in a perfect world.
The first is the web of confusing, conflicting and archaic laws that hem in our ability to carry out activities.
They require that we spend money in certain ways, even if those aren't the things that the people of Haiti actually want and need.
Five years after the earthquake, what USAID should be doing is helping Haitians achieve their own goals in terms of education, health, infrastructure.
We shouldn't be doing for them, we should be doing with them.
But Haiti has a number of very serious problems with corruption, political inefficiency, political turmoil.
You need a government that represents the will of the people, and that has the capacity to act.
And sometimes will and capacity are both missing.
Gandhi: While many attempts to reform this system have been made, to date nothing has changed.
And the result is the failed disaster capitalism we see in Haiti, where aid has become an industry of for-profit companies.
In fact, only a month after the earthquake, our own US ambassador was quoted in a leaked document claiming, "The gold rush is on.
" And now these same companies are using lobbying groups to ensure reforms never come.
Johnston: It's often said that waste, inefficiency, corruption, these are problems that are unique to the developing world, that are unique to Haiti.
And the reality is that these are actually fundamental aspects of the US Foreign Aid complex.
Instead of relying on potentially corrupt money we simply give it to US companies and allow them to take 25% off the top.
It'sa different form of corruption.
And without realizing that, then we will continue to make the same mistakes again going forward.