In this week’s OtherWords editorial package, my colleague Matias Ramos describes his latest immigration ordeal. It began when an employee of a company with a government contract attempted to expedite his deportation even though the Obama administration had announced that cases like Ramos’s are officially a low priority. Clearly, that kind of outsourcing raises ethical questions. But there are economic concerns too. As Beth Schulman explains, “on average, Uncle Sam spends nearly twice as much when the government outsources a job as it would if it just hired another ‘expensive’ federal worker.” Get all this and more in your inbox by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do.

  1. MIA: Obama’s New Common-Sense Immigration Policy / Matias Ramos
  2. Blocking Palestinian Statehood / Chris Toensing
  3. America’s Government Contracting Bonanza Bilks Taxpayers / Beth Schulman
  4. The Drug War Spreads the Bloodbath South / John Lindsay-Poland
  5. It’s Class Warfare, All Right / Donald Kaul
  6. The Corporate Takeover of the 2012 Presidential Election / Jim Hightower
  7. Big Agriculture’s Latin American Exploits / William A. Collins
  8. Poverty News / Khalil Bendib

Poverty News, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

OtherWords commentaries are free to re-publish in print and online — all it takes is a simple attribution to OtherWords.org. To get a roundup of our work each Wednesday, sign up for our free weekly newsletter here.

(Note: Images credited to Getty or Shutterstock are not covered by our Creative Commons license. Please license these separately if you wish to use them.)