Why would a 501c3 non-profit organized to promote summer camps spend 10 per cent of its annual budget[1] on a Hillary Clinton speech?

That was the simple question I wanted to answer when I began researching this piece. I’d flippantly doubted that the American Camp Association would pay $225K for a speech and was corrected by kossack northleft that the actual amount was $260K. Intrigued by the notion that Hillary Clinton knew anything about camping, I soon found myself exploring a much deeper set of issues.

On March 19, 2015 Hillary Clinton made the last of a series of paid speeches to the Tri-State Chapter of the American Camp Association (ACA). Twenty-four days later she would declare her candidacy for the presidency. While much has been made of her behind-closed-doors speeches to Goldman Sachs, the ACA speech and its follow-up Q&A session with former NY Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who owns Timber Lake, an overnight camp in the Catskill Mountains, was available right here on Daily Kos[2].

The Clinton speech was a departure for the ACA, which typically presents keynotes by child development experts and professionals associated with camp-related issues. It was a light and conversational 26 minutes that touched on politics only to the extent that Clinton facetiously suggested that the adults in Washington would do well to go to a bipartisan camp. It was Blue Cabin meet Red Cabin fluff, which got a couple of good laughs. The Q&A session lasted 36 minutes. So who was she talking to?

The American Camp Association is a national non-profit 501c3 that has 10,000 members and three regional affiliates that represent 2,500 summer and day camps throughout the U.S. It provides professional development and educational opportunities for the camp industry and among its top public-policy priorities lobbies for the Camp Counselor[3] and Student Work Travel (SWT) [4] categories of the J-1 visa program administered by the U.S. State Department.

State Department J-1 Visa Program Advocacy

According to the ACA’s own advocacy materials, 25,000 individuals were placed in ACA camps through the State Department’s Exchange Visitor Program in 2011– 20,000 from the specific Camp Counselor category; and 5,000 from the SWT category. Both categories of student workers are facilitated by a network of 49 State Department-approved “sponsors”. In effect, these are staffing agencies that work with feeder organizations in dozens of countries that recruit international students and workers to come to the U.S. for a four-month cultural/work experience.

The SWT program grew dramatically – from 20,000 participants in the early 1990s to a peak of 153,000 workers in 2008. It is currently capped at 109,000 workers after public outrage over widespread abuses of working conditions, accommodation, compensation and a non-existent cultural component.

Participants pay significant fees to the sponsoring agencies ($1100 to $2000) in the hope they will experience America and make some money while they are here. In reality, the experience is often far removed from the exciting marketing materials on sponsor web sites. Sixty to eighty-hour weeks of making beds, flipping burgers, working the night shift and sleeping four, six or eight to a room in poor accommodations for minimum wage are all too common.

Employers in such resort towns as Ocean City, Maryland, employ thousands of these SWT workers for a variety of reasons divorced from any notion of cultural exchange. For starters, they save 8 per cent over the cost of employing domestic workers because they don’t have to contribute to Social Security, Medicare or Federal Unemployment Insurance.

The Camp Counselor program which the ACA fully embraces, offers similar advantages to employers. State Department rule changes in 2012 sought to draw a clearer distinction between counselors and SWT staff roles but tremendous ambiguity and virtually non-existent enforcement remain.

Those sponsoring agencies that do present an accurate picture of the job explain that counselors work 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week during a nine-week camp placement. Sponsoring agencies describe compensation as a stipend[5] and an ACA 2013 FAQ as “pocket money”[6]. Even using the high end of the stipend range ($1800), you get abysmal compensation: $1800 for nine 72-hour weeks, works out to $2.77 an hour.

Undoubtedly there are some cultural benefits for young campers exposed to international counselors, but it would be naive to think that the obvious financial incentives for the camp owners are not front and center in the decision to hire staff from abroad. For argument’s sake, if we simply distributed the 20,000 counselors and 5,000 SWTs that the ACA claimed were employed in its 2,500 camps during 2011, each camp would have employed eight J-1 visa counselors and two J-1 visa SWT workers. In other words, the camp industry relies heavily on this cheaper international labor force.

Major Problems with the J-1 Labor Pipeline

In 2014, The Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) presented a report titled Culture Shock: The Exploitation of J-1 Cultural Exchange Workers,[7] which argued

“The undeniable conclusion is that these J-1 programs, an initiative once envisioned as a tool of diplomacy, has become little more than a source of cheap labor for employers.”

Bernie Sanders, during debate on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill S.744 , called the program “a scam.”

“It is not a cultural-exchange program,” he said. “It is displacing young American workers at a time of double-digit unemployment among young people, and it is putting downward pressure on wages at a time when the American people are working longer hours for lower wages.” [8]

In response, the ACA lobbied to keep the program alive. Quoting from its 2014 annual report, it argued that the ”ACA successfully mobilized the community to advocate for the continuation of the government program that allows for international visitors to serve as camp staff, thereby providing amazing cultural exchange programs for American kids and foreign nationals. This program was at risk during the Congressional debates regarding immigration reform.[9]”

Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, summed up the disastrous state of the program exactly one year to the day before former secretary of state Clinton delivered her American Camp Association speech.[10]

“It’s now clear to almost everyone that the Summer Work Travel Program is in dire straits - and it’s a black eye on our immigration system. And because the noble goal of facilitating cultural exchanges will NOT be negatively affected if the program is shrunk dramatically or even eliminated, it’s time for President Obama and Congress to direct the State Department to suspend and fix the SWT program immediately. If State fails to act, Congress should eliminate SWT altogether.

Placing a $260,000 Bet on Favorable Executive Action

Consider the final paragraph, on the final page of the ACA’s FY2014 financial disclosures (New York Section), which I might add are not available currently on the ACA NYNJ site (as of 2/21/2016). It took some digging to find the information on charitiesnys.com.

“For the March 2015 Tri-State Camping Conference, the Organization hired a high-profile politician as a guest speaker, which resulted in an additional cost of $260,000. This was a one-time expense and such expenses are not expected to occur in the subsequent year.”[11]

Returning then to my original question: Why does a non-profit spend 10 per cent of its annual budget, ten times what it would normally pay for a keynote speaker,[12] increase its annual total expense line item for “speaker presentations” from $102,784 to $350,619 for a high-profile politician and present her to an audience probably split in its political loyalties?

The answer is obvious. It was a strategic calculation on the association’s part to secure future consideration for the J-1 visa programs the industry relies on. As a near-term-future president the former Secretary of State would have tremendous discretion in rule-making given both her familiarity with the subject and the likelihood that immigration reform in a partisan Washington may be achievable only through piecemeal executive action.

There can be no doubt that Hillary Clinton was and is aware of the industry’s focused immigration interests. Of course you can make the default argument that this is just the way things are done in American politics and that there is no proof that any quid pro quo will ever take place, but it appears even more cynical to accept $260,000 from this organization in the context of these immigration and economic issues than the bottomless pockets of Goldman Sachs.

It’s disappointing that even this innocuous paid speech, the last in series of speeches rife with high-profile question marks, has a lousy backstory upon closer inspection.

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Footnotes

1 - New York Section of American Camp Association 2014 Financials

2 - Daily Kos Diary containing full video of Clinton speech to American Camp Association

3 - US State Department J-1 Visa - Camp Counselor

4 - US State Department J-1 Visa - Student Work Travel

5 - Camp Counselor Stipend

6 - Camp Counselor "Pocket Money"

7 - Southern Poverty Law Center - Culture Shock: The Exploitation of J-1 Cultural Exchange Workers

8 - Bernie Sander’s Comments on J-1 Visa Workers During S.744 Immigration Debate

9 - American Camp Association Lobbies for J-1 Status Quo 2014 Annual Report, pg 9

10 - Daniel Costa, Economic Policy Institute Article — J-1 Program Poorly Regulated my emphasis

11- New York Section, ACA financial disclosure Notes to Financial Statements June 30, 2015 and 2014