Thread: The New Political Economy of Immigration

By Tom Barry

This article is from the January/February 2009 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives ... barry.html

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This article is from the January/February 2009 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

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The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.

Responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus—doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds.

Today, after the shift in the immigration debate, the $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the already-bloated prison industry. Even now, with the economy imploding, immigrants are currently behind one of the country’s most profitable industries: they are the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population.

Across the country new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year. State and local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic developmentâ€

[quote]What started off as a war against terrorism has devolved into a war against immigrants. The current “enforcement-onlyâ€