Here’s a new twist on outsourcing: housing U.S. inmates in Mexican prisons.

This week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that the state might outsource incarceration by opening prisons in Mexico in order to house jailed undocumented immigrants.

Sfgate.com reports the governor saying, “We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. … And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons.”

Of the state’s 171,000 prisoners, approximately 19,000 are illegal immigrants. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system. Schwarzenegger predicted housing prisoners in Mexico instead of California would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

The idea has a certain logic: Under the terms of the 1977 Prisoner Transfer Treaty between the United States and Mexico, United States prisoners in Mexican jails and Mexican prisoners in United States jails may choose to serve their sentences in their home countries.

But there’s a definite taint of “let’s send the illegals back where they came from” anti-immigrant sentiment in the governor’s comment. Beyond that, it’s just a very odd idea. When one breaks the law within a given set of borders, it makes sense to be punished within the limits of that same country. Each country has its own philosophy of crime and punishment. Mexico tends to have longer waits for sentencing, for instance, but shorter prison terms.

And though there’s no yelp.com for prisons around the world, it’s pretty clear that Mexican prisons aren’t known to be models of modern and humane incarceration.

An analysis of Mexican prison conditions (drawing from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook) concludes that “overcrowding of prisons is chronic. Mistreatment of prisoners, the lack of trained guards, and inadequate sanitary facilities compound the problem. The United States Department of State’s country reports on human rights practices for 1992 and 1993 state that an entrenched system of corruption undermines prison authority and contributes to abuses. Authority frequently is exercised by prisoners, displacing prison officials. Violent confrontations, often linked to drug trafficking, are common between rival prison groups.

In fact, just this week, a prison riot in the Mexican state of Durango left 23 inmates dead.

Female inmates in Mexican prisons are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. Photo: Caroline Bennett

Not that Mexico suffers in every prison-related comparison. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. And Mexico has some prison policies that are more humane than those in the U.S. For example, women inmates are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. The Huffington Post recently published a photo essay on Mexican Prison Life: Babies Behind Bars.

Even if the prisons in Mexico were built and run by the U.S., Schwarzenegger ‘s idea would still be problematic. Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, said it “would be like the state of California having a separate island of its own government in Mexico. It just seems like that would be impossible.”

The not-so-sweet spot where privatization meets outsourcing

Schwarzenegger’s suggestion sits at the intersection of privatization and outsourcing. Earlier this month, our my-governor-can-beat-up-your-governor called for allowing private companies to compete with state-run prisons, which he claims would save billions of dollars.

And beyond privatization, it seems that in this era of free trade in a global economy, everything’s on the table for possible outsourcing: manufacturing, telephone help centers, retirement, medical care, and now, imprisonment.

What’s next—the outsourcing of education? Maybe public school would be more viable if you only had to pay teachers a few dollars an hour. And how about outsourcing funeral services? We could send our loved ones abroad for cut-rate embalming, Fed Ex them back to the local cemetery, then hire illegal immigrants to help us mourn.

Sandra Shaw Homer, who has lived in Costa Rica for over 20 years, did something a little over a year ago that all writers will applaud and probably envy. She pared away from her life all but the essential, so that she might, for a year, concentrate on writing the book she knew she was meant to write.

She’d been very active in a few local nonprofits, and she scaled back her commitments, quitting boards and letting people know that she’d be putting her energies elsewhere for a time.

And dammit if she didn’t write that book! In a year. I’m beyond envious—I’m positively inspired. I keep looking at little huts on the side of the road or up on top of mountains, thinking, Now there’s a good place to hole up and write.

The book is Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica. It centers around a garden on her land on the shores of Lake Arenal, an organic garden a longtime friend, Evelio, tries to create out of nothing. Evelio is a local, born and bred in the Arenal area, and he has a natural talent for planting and tending. But trying to garden organically, and on a plot ravaged by the winds off the lake, turns out to be more than he–and Sandy, as his enabler/landlord/cheerleader–bargained for.

Sandy describes the ups and downs of the gardening project, but more than that, she details how the achingly beautiful land around the lake is at risk of devastation. Not incidentally, a portrait of expat life emerges, as we learn of Sandy’s neighbors from Europe and North America and Costa Rica and see how they all coexist, sometimes peaceably, sometimes contentiously.

It’s a book about how we live on the land, how it nourishes us and how we should nourish it. It’s beautifully written and has a strong sense of place. I’m honored that Sandy let me read it and that she’s allowing me to publish an excerpt here.

Excerpt from Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica, by Sandra Shaw Homer

All land has a history, and the history around here goes back a long way.  Satellite images have picked up old roads all over this canton, long grown over, made by the indigenous peoples of pre-Columbian times.  One of these roads runs along the south shore of the lake, uphill from the current road and downhill from the ridge that links Tilarán with the tiny villages of Silencio and Río Chiquito.  I have ridden my mare along one stretch of this old road that runs behind San Luís and Tronadora, much washed out and crowded with second-growth forest, and it took a man on horseback with a machete to cut open a way for us to pass.  Artifacts of the native people show up everywhere.  When the lake is low, you can go out in a kayak or canoe and explore along the naked shoreline for pottery shards.  In town, there’s hardly a house that doesn’t sport a metate, or corn-grinding stone, that turned up when the foundation was being dug.  It usually has a potted plant sitting on it.

Modern local history dates from the late nineteenth century, when there were gold mines south of here in Las Juntas and Líbano.  It was rough country then, virgin forest, and the only way in was by horse or mule.  The gold was shipped out in ox-carts.  (More recently it was taken out in helicopters!)  Gradually settlement drifted north, and people carved farms out of the ancient forests, establishing a fiercely independent, frontier life-style.  Even in the 1930s, it could take the better part of a week to get to San José – from Tilarán on horseback (oxcart took longer) to Cañas, where you waited days for a small boat to take you down the Bebedero to the Río Tempisque and the port of Puntarenas, then by all-day train up to the Central Valley.  The Inter-American highway wasn’t completed along its northern reaches until the sixties.  There was no paved road around the lake until the eighties.  (It’s still not finished.)  I have met retired school teachers in Tilarán who remember four-hour treks on horseback to get to their one-room school houses on the lake, sometimes in mud up to the horses’ knees.  The niece of one of these teachers told me that her grandparents owned our farm in those days, and that it was a much bigger property.  A lot of the farms around here were broken up when ICE acquired the land for the reservoir.  Since then, the process of development has been inexorable.  As long as there’s someone to buy, sooner or later a farmer will face the economic conditions that force him to sell, frequently just a small piece at a time, enough to give him ready cash to get along until beef prices go up, or the weather improves enough to let him get a good crop in.  There are still some fair-sized farms around the lake, but since the early nineties development has speeded up and been gringo-ized. (At least in Tilarán, the word gringo can refer to Europeans as well as to non-native-Spanish-speakers from north of the Río Grande. Our nearest neighbors are Germans.)

Earlier this year an 18-wheeler parked its trailer by the side of the road just uphill from Cinco Esquinas, smack in your face where the first grand view of the lake should be.  It was a mobile office with the name of an international real-estate company painted in large letters on its side.  This was beyond ugly, but it never opened.  Instead the world-wide recession brought local real estate sales almost to a halt.  Still the trailer sat there, month after month, until finally some locals couldn’t resist jacking the thing up to steal a pair of off-side tires, leaving it listing crazily on a slender pile of cement blocks.  Just the other day it finally disappeared.  How it was moved, nobody seems to know.  But nobody was sorry to see it go.  This little story – especially the part about getting that trailer out of there – is no doubt already brewing up into a local legend.

We’ve been here long enough to see people come and go.  Some can brave the remoteness, the vagaries of the weather and the strangeness of the culture, and some can’t.  Some people get attached to the land, and some don’t.

When I was growing up, my family never lived long enough in one place for me to become bound to the land.  We lived in some beautiful – and not so beautiful – places, both rural and suburban.  From my early twenties until I came to Costa Rica, I moved almost as frequently, living exclusively in cities.   It was a little shock to realize, when we started building this house five years ago, that I’ve lived on Lake Arenal, and on this particular plot of ground, longer than I’ve lived any place else in my entire life.

You can’t get attached to the earth in Philadelphia or New York.  How many millions of people never do?  It’s this attachment that fires my desire to protect it – but not just my attachment to this particular plot of ground, but to the whole thing, the planet.  It’s not such a giant leap of the imagination from the sight of a growing young forest to the image of a tiny blue speck in the vastness of the universe.  So, finally, it is the sense of place that has captured me and pinned me to the planet.

It is gratifying to be part of the history of the land, to be growing a farm instead of shrinking it, to be building a forest instead of cutting it down.  Here, in one tiny corner of the planet, the question becomes obvious:  do we add something by our tenancy of the earth, or do we take it away?

As an American expat in China, James Fallow wondered  “how much long-term damage foreigners do themselves” by living in “smoky, urban China.” He decided to find out.

He asked doctors and public-health experts what they thought of how expats fare in China, where, according to World Bank estimates, 750,000 people die prematurely each year just from air pollution. “Alarming upsurges in birth defects and cancer rates are reported even in the state-controlled press,” notes Fallow, in his “How I Survived China” in the November issue of The Atlantic.

The air quality is so bad, writes Fallow, that he and his wife joked with friends that now was the time to take up smoking, since their lungs would never know the difference.

A foreign-trained doctor in Beijing told Fallow, “Just using your eyes, you know this can’t be good for anybody.”  Fallow continues,

Another way to know this is via a clandestine air-quality station that the U.S. Embassy has built in Beijing. The Chinese government does not report, and may not even measure, what other countries consider the most dangerous form of air pollution: PM2.5, the smallest particulate matter, tiny enough to work its way deep into the alveoli. Instead, Chinese reports cover only the grosser PM10 particulates, which are less dangerous but more unsightly, because they make the air dark and turn your handkerchief black if you blow your nose. (Spitting on the street: routine in China. Blowing your nose into a handkerchief: something no cultured person would do.) These unauthorized PM2.5 readings, sent out on a Twitter stream (BeijingAir), show the pollution in Beijing routinely to be in the “Very Unhealthy” or “Hazardous” range, not seen in U.S. cities in decades.

Other doctors and fellow expats told him, “you get over it” (bouncing back once they return to more healthy settings), and that he should “worry about something else.” A Chinese doctor told Fallow, “I tell my patients, the most important ‘medical’ step you can take is to put on a seat belt in a car, wear a helmet on a bike, and run for your life in crosswalks.”

But Fallows ends on a high note, quoting a Western-trained doctor pointing out that China “is an exciting place. It’s a historic time. People seem to feel alive.”

“That made sense when I heard it,” writes Fallow. “In China I had felt terrible, but alive…and that makes me say that foreigners who want to go should not be deterred.”

Photo: atlasnetwork.org

Here’s what we know for sure: the number of U.S. citizens moving abroad has exploded in the last 50 years. Seems that people want to bust out of provinciality in the same way prisoners want to bust out of jail.

• Between 1966 – 1996 the number of Americans living abroad quadrupled, from 70,000 in 1966 to between 3 and 4 million in 1996 (Source: U.S. State Dept.).
• Ten years later, in 2006, estimates were closer to 6 million.

But the word estimate is key here.

When I wrote Living Abroad on Costa Rica, I had the devil of time finding a reliable number for how many Americans made that very livable Central American country their home.

Estimates ranged from 200,000 to almost four times that, but there didn’t seem to be any credible sources with accurate numbers.

It’s just as hard, if not more so, to nail down the number of Americans living abroad in general.

God knows the U.S. government has tried. In 2004 the Census Department did what they called an Overseas Enumeration Test, attempting to count the number of Americans living in Kuwait, Mexico, and France. The program was a dismal failure. In Mexico, for example—where the estimates of American expats ranges from 300,000 (according the the US State Dept.) to over a million (according to groups representing Americans overseas) — only 250 people completed a census form! The response was also weak in France, where 2,600 people filled out a form of an estimated American population of 112,000.

Census official Louis Kincannon admitted that issues of confidentiality and taxation might be at play here. “There are people who have a disinclination to be identified to any government,” Kincannon said.

In other words: Those who want to lose themselves often don’t want to be found.

U.S. senior citizens living in Mexico should have their medical care covered by Medicare, says Paul Crist, a former senator’s aid who now lives in Puerto Vallarta. In the current debate over health care, Crist’s idea seems to be gaining ground.

Right now, retired U.S. citizens cannot claim Medicare benefits for treatment received in Mexico—or Costa Rica, or France, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter–even though they paid into the Medicare system throughout their working lives.

Crist, a former aid to Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., recently founded the non-profit Americans For Medicare In Mexico, which has lobbied 85 members in the U.S. Congress to get Medicare accepted south of the border.

Estimates of how many Americans live in Mexico (and abroad in general) vary, but the influential Association of Americans Resident Overseas puts the figure at 1,036,300. Crist says perhaps 200,000 of the Americans living in Mexico are eligible for Medicare, with about two-thirds of those seniors returning to the U.S. for medical treatment.

Not only would extending Medicare to Mexico be the right thing to do—if you pay into the system, you should receive the benefits—but Crist maintains in a Forbes article that such a program would also save the U.S. government a lot of money. Studies show that health care services are up to 70% less expensive in Mexico than in the U.S.

In Mexico, a visit to a doctor’s office often runs between $30 and $40, according to MedToGo, while a hospital room costs $90 to $100 a night. Besides private health care insurance, the Mexican Institute of Social Security (which goes by the Spanish initials IMSS) provides affordable, if basic, health insurance for all Mexican residents, regardless of nationality.

If Medicare were accepted in Mexico, says Crist, many of the American retirees currently flying back to the U.S. for expensive care would instead opt for treatment nearer their homes, cutting Medicare’s overall costs.

Program would need controls

An article in the Guadalajara Reporter notes that if Medicare is extended to Mexico, the program would only work with health care providers with Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation . The JCI provides a certification process for health care facilities throughout the world.

Crist says ten hospitals in Mexico already have JCI accreditation and another 23 are seeking approval. Among those already approved are the American British Padre Hospital and the Santa Fe Hospital in Mexico City and the Christus Muguerza Hospital and the Hospital Tec de Monterrey in Monterrey.

Mexico would no doubt welcome Medicare funding, just as they welcome the increase in medical tourism to their country.

Research done by the Association for Private Hospitals in Jalisco reveals that of the 21.5 million tourists who visited Mexico in 2006, about 160,000 – mostly Americans – came for medical attention.

Response from Congress

Crist say that response to his plan to bring Medicare to Mexico has been  “quite positive, especially on the House side.”

But Forbes reports that the offices of Reps. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and other sympathetic legislators have also told Crist that this year they have too much on their plate, and that it would be politically wiser to introduce a stand-alone Mexico-Medicare bill next year, separate from the complex health care reform package currently working its way through Capitol Hill.

There are also calls for an in-depth three-year Mexico-Medicare pilot project to determine whether Mexican health care meets Medicare’s quality standards and determine if the payment system is sufficiently free of fraud.

Photo by Linda Parker.

In an interview about a new study that finds that living abroad stimulates creative thinking, William Maddux draws a connection between time abroad and entrepreneurial activity.

“These days,” he says, “with companies having more of an incentive for creative thinking–to find their way out of the financial crisis–any company that’s interested in creativity should be looking at people who have had these [live abroad] experiences.”

Scientific American reports briefly on the link between living abroad and creativity, but if you want the real deal, download the 15-page paper, Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity, wade through the academic language, and revel in yet another reason to head for Croatia or Chad or Costa Rica.

Many artists do their best work abroad
The paper cites 5 separate studies, and mentions that “living abroad is often seen as a necessary experience for aspiring artists” and that “some creative individuals produce their best known masterworks during or following a stint abroad (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov and his novel Lolita, Ernest Hemingway and his The Sun Also Rises). In fact, all four winners of the Nobel Prize in literature who are from Ireland (Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney) spent significant portions of their lives abroad. In addition to writers, many famous painters, (e.g., Gauguin and Picasso) and composers (e.g., Handel, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg) created many of their most admired works while living in foreign countries.”

Three ways living abroad stimulates creativity

According to the paper,
1. Living abroad gives you access to a greater number of novel ideas and concepts, which then act as inputs for the creative process.

2. Living abroad allows people to approach problems from different perspectives. For example, in some cultures (e.g., China), leaving food on one’s plate is an implicit sign of appreciation, implying that the host has provided enough to eat. In other countries (e.g., the United States) the same behavior may often be taken as an insult, a condemnation of the quality of the meal.

3. Experiences in foreign cultures can increase the psychological readiness to accept and recruit ideas from unfamiliar sources, thus facilitating the processes of unconscious idea recombination and conceptual expansion.

And while I agree with all of that, the ponderous language of the study makes me want to blurt out, Yeah, and living abroad is also good FUN!

Recently, the Costa Rican Congress unanimously approved a law overhauling the country’s immigration policy. The new law is expected to take effect in early 2010.

Costa Rica is by far the most popular Central American country for Americans to buy a second home or to make the move and live there full time. Many in the latter group chose to become permanent legal residents of the country. The process for doing so is fairly simple (though often rife with bureaucratic delays).

The new law, however, increases the monthly income aspiring residents must prove to be given residency status.

For the pensionado (pensioner/retiree) category, you used to have to prove just $600 a month in pension income, from either the U.S. government or a private source (like the brokerage house that administers your IRA account). When the new law goes into effect, you’ll need to prove $1000/month in retirement income.

For the rentista (small investor) category, it was necessary to prove a monthly income of $1000 (usually a CD or annuity), guaranteed by a banking institution. When the new law goes into effect next year, you’ll need to prove a monthly income of $2,500.

For more information, see How do I get residency in Costa Rica?

Speaking of The Geography of Bliss (in which author Eric Weiner travels the world to see where people are happiest), I was reminded of the world map of happiness (scroll down in the BBC’s article to download map). First created in 2006 by Adrian White of the UK’s University of Leicester, the map used responses from 80,000 people worldwide to map out world happiness, or as they say in the field, subjective well being.

White noted,  “There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per capita, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy. The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the world.”

While happiness levels may have shifted in the last 3 years, it’s interesting to note that in 2006, Western European countries garnered most of the top spots, though two nations in Latin American and the Caribbean made it into the top 15–the Bahamas at number 5 and Costa Rica at number 13. The USA didn’t do too badly, weighing in at number 23.

The 20 happiest nations in the World were:

1 – Denmark
2 – Switzerland
3 – Austria
4 – Iceland
5 – The Bahamas
6 – Finland
7 – Sweden
8 – Bhutan
9 – Brunei
10 – Canada
11 – Ireland
12 – Luxembourg
13 – Costa Rica
14 – Malta
15 – The Netherlands
16 – Antigua and Barbuda
17 – Malaysia
18 – New Zealand
19 – Norway
20 – The Seychelles

Other notable results included:
23 – USA
35 – Germany
41 – UK
62 – France
82 – China
90 – Japan
125 – India
167 – Russia

The three least happy countries were:

176 – Democratic Republic of the Congo
177 – Zimbabwe
178 – Burundi

Method
The 2006 world map of happiness used data from he Veenhoven Database of World Happiness (which Eric Weiner visits while researching The Geography of Bliss), along with UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the United Nations Development Program.

A recent study of women working abroad by the European Professional Women’s Network (EPWN) finds that women who moved abroad for their own job are twice as happy with their professional life as those who moved for their partner’s job (81% versus 44%). Women (or men) who move abroad for their partner’s job are often called ‘trailing spouses.’

One out of four women (24%) who followed their partner are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their professional life.

Expat women happiest in their professional lives in France and Belgium
EPWN’s study built on an Expatica survey of expat women working in Europe,  which found that expat women in Belgium and France were the most happy with their professional lives, while women in Germany and the Netherlands were the least satisfied. Still, women had both good and bad things to say about working in all European countries.

“In Brussels, it seems especially hard to become established professionally if you’re not fluent in French and Dutch, which is obviously unlikely if you are a foreigner,” said an expat woman living in Belgium.

“Dutch people are usually polite and nice to you, ”says an expat living in the Netherlands. “But they will rarely invite you to their homes or include you in their circle of friends. My partner’s Dutch, but even with his family, I find them to be too polite, to the extent of being aloof.”

Expat women happiest living in Spain
Seventy-two percent of women polled said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their life abroad. Female expats based in Spain were happiest (81 percent), followed by Belgium (79 percent) and France (79 percent).  Interestingly, last year’s survey results had women in Spain ranked among the lowest in satisfaction.