http://www.workers.org/2006/us/private-prisons-0803/

Private prisons profit from immigrant bashing
By Heather Cottin

Published Jul 29, 2006 12:31 AM
They’re salivating on Wall Street. Putting immigrants behind bars is the latest growth industry.

Stockbrokers are urging their clients to “buy corrections stock.” (New York Times, July 19) For fat cats in the prison-industrial complex, anti-immigrant laws already on the books and future repressive anti-immigrant legislation promise a gold rush for profits.

The government is using the 2004 Inte ligence Reform and Terrorism Preven tion Act (IRTPA) to justify the capture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants.

This isn’t new; it’s just become big business.

In the mid-1990s the El Paso Border Patrol, then headed by Silvestre Reyes, initiated “Operation Blockade,” which captured immigrants after they crossed into the U.S. This spurred on the militarization of the southwestern border. (Texas Obser ver, May 15). Reyes is currently a U.S. Con gressperson from Texas.

Immigration reform laws passed in 1996 by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton allowed the detention and deportation of any non-citizen convicted of such crimes as drunk driving, hot-check writing and shoplifting.

Now immigration agents catch an estimated 1 million “illegal” entrants per year, and the big prison-industrial moguls are vying for contracts to build more detention centers in cities and counties. Nationwide, immigration has recently surpassed drugs as the number one federally prosecuted “crime.”

Profiting from racism

MSN Money’s Michael Brush, in a glowing analysis of prison industry stocks, wrote in 2005 that “private prison companies look like solid investments for the next several years” because legislation “makes it likely that more illegal immigrants will be caught.” (MSN Money, Jan. 5, 2005)

The stock of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has increased 27 percent since February, and the company has now been awarded a contract to run a detention facility in Taylor, Texas, where whole families, including children, will be incarcerated.

The Geo Group—which operates prisons in the U.S., Australia, South Africa and Britain—has increased its stock earnings by 68 percent in the same period.

Detention centers, according to Wall Street analysts, produce profit margins of more than 20 percent every year. (New York Times, July 18) KBR, a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Co. and the firm that built the cages in Guantánamo, Cuba, won a contract in January to build new “temporary” facilities for immigrants in Laredo, Texas. The Department of Home land Security wanted the facilities in case of an “emergency influx of immigrants.” Texas accounts for 80 percent of all incarcerated undocumented immigrants.

The government agency hunting down immigrants is now called Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. The bud get for border enforcement has increased from $1.2 billion in 1995 to $4.7 billion in 2006. And most of that money is now going to the prison-industrial complex.

In October the so-called “catch-and-release” policy, in which undocumented immigrants are released on their own recog nizance, will end. Immigrants will be incarcerated and have no rights under law. They will be deported after detention.

Whether or not Congress passes repressive anti-immigrant legislation, such as HR4437 (the Sensenbrenner bill) or S2611 (the Hegel-Martinez bill), conditions for immigrants will worsen. And while they suffer, profits will soar.

Although the Pew Hispanic Center reports that the number of unauthorized immigrants has declined by 50,000 a year since the late 1990s, the number of incarcerated detainees has more than tripled in the past 12 years. Meanwhile, hiring by the Border Patrol has increased by 200 percent and hiring by the U.S. Marshals Service has jumped 2,100 percent.

Racism lurks deep within the Border Patrol and the Marshals Service in the Southwest and recruits are encouraged to perform their jobs with xenophobic zeal.

Under the new “Secure Border Initia tive,” imprisoned undocumented people have limited access to lawyers, phones, translators and timely medical care. (Associated Press, Feb. 2)

Capitalists super-exploit immigrants by paying them sub-minimum wages and deny ing them benefits that were won long ago by the workers’ movement. They can only get away with it by dividing immigrants from the rest of the working class—which is the intent of these repressive laws.

Now they’ve found another way to profit from the suffering of the undocumented: the “cash cow” of privatized jails and prisons, where corporations get rich off tax dollars spent by the federal, state, county and municipal governments.

The great demonstrations this spring showed there’s a strong and united immigrant rights movement. When the rest of the progressive movement joins it in solidarity against the repressive laws that are putting workers by the tens of thousands behind bars, this grim situation can be turned around.