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Immigrants for Sale
Today, our friends at Brave New Foundation launched the 'Immigrants for Sale' campaign with a powerful animated video exposing the way private prisons profit off the passage of anti-immigrant legislation, and what that means for the democratic process.
The video is the first in an on-going series documenting the abuse, corruption and corporate influence that drives both the rush to privatize incarceration and the draconian sentencing and immigration laws that make the rush profitable.
The three largest corporate players in the industry -- CCA (the Corrections Corporation of America), The Geo Group and Management and Training corporations -- reap annual profits of more than $5 billion a year at the same time as they dole out more than $20 million annually in lobbying to (mostly rightwing) state legislators to ensure the approval of the regional anti-immigrant laws that fill their coffers.
An NPR report outlined how CCA and co. aim to translate the anti-immigrant rhetoric and political void into a long-lasting cash drive -- believing that illegal immigrants will continue to provide a fresh and highly profitable influx of new inmates to their cells if harsh anti-immigration legislation Arizona-style stays popular.
As Brave New Films' Alex Cabbellero writes at Huffington Post, "CCA founder Tomas Beasly once called his scheme 'more profitable' than selling burgers or cars -- a clear indication that any sense of justice in the prison industry will be forever trumped by cash flows and profit margins."
We have a huge, multi-layered problem with incarceration in this country. The US prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades. Moreover, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than two-thirds of released prisoners are re-arrested within three years, and returned to the system much more quickly than in the past. This unusually high recidivism rate, a travesty, is directly linked to a decrease in programs aimed at rehabilitation.
Prison privatization just makes this problem much, much worse because recidivism is actually a good thing from the financial perspective of a corporation operating private prisons. The "Immigrants For Sale" campaign is one attempt to stem the tide. Sign the pledge and become part of the nationwide network of Prison Watchers that is following and exposing the players, the money and the victims in this corrupt, anti-democratic rush to mass privatized incarceration.
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Show AllEVERY DECISION ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS AN ADVERTISEMENT PRO OR CON..THIS ARTICLE LAMENTS THE TREATMENT OF ILLEGALS IN AMERICAN PRISONS..which sends the message to future illegals to reconsider breaking immigration laws..thus this article is helping to end illegal immigration...but this articles main point is sympathy for illegals which will encourage futher illegality..thus some of the encouraged illegals will end up in these prisons..so probably this author should have not written the article...its called getting caught in the chinese finger puzzle...
The motivation for immigrants is not to "break the immigration laws" it is to survive.
Why would you ridicule sympathy for the most vulnerable and least powerful among us?
It is the criminality and illegality and brutality of wealthy owners in the US and their henchmen in the oppressive and brutal regimes in Latin America - funded and trained by the US government - that causes the desperation that is driving immigration into the US.
To imagine that indigenous people threatened with starvation, imprisonment, torture and murder are trying to get one over on us, or take unfair advantage of anything, or represent some dire threat to us, the workers here, is illogical to the point of absurdity. People threatened with starvation, imprisonment, torture and murder in their so-ca;;ed home countries - those countries are more like plantations for US corporations than anything else - will obviously risk anything right up to starvation, imprisonment, torture and murder in order to come here and survive. Those, such as yourself, advocating police state measures in order to tip the cost-benefit balance and discourage immigrants would need to advocate starvation, imprisonment, torture and murder to make that effective. I fear that many here do harbor that sort of hostility toward immigrants, and would support virtually any sort of brutality being waged against them.
Immigration is a symptom of our collective misery - all of us on both sides of the border - not a cause of the misery.
Blocking people from fleeing the US corporate plantations, enforced by repressive military regimes of unimaginable cruelty and violence, merely hastens the day when we will all be living under similar conditions. Yet people such as yourself, defying all reason and logic, claim the exact opposite and want people to believe that the repressive police states in latin America could never happen here, and that those police states have nothing whatsoever to do with the US ruling class or the US government.
You would have us believe that those oppressing and terrorizing the immigrants will never turn their sits on "us" - white "Americans" - and that we can therefore safely support the assault on indigenous people from Latin America without suffering any consequences ourselves. What is it that leads people to think "we" are special, are immune, will be treated well by the rulers when it is our turn to be declared "illegal?" It could only be the delusions associated with American exceptionalism and white supremacy.
Those advocating brutal and repressive measures against immigrant re in for a rude awakening, as those exact same measures will soon be used against them. Then who will stand with them?
This is an excellent article that explains how, contrary to an oft-expressed position here by CD readers, that it is the criminalization and the assaults on immigrants that benefit the owners and that are a threat to all of us, not the immigrants themselves.
Agreed.
But it's way too counter-intuitive for heartless simpletons.
Capitalism needs to have an excess of people over job openings to keep wages down and workers competing for smaller and smaller piece of the pie.
With the advent of birth control people to survive in a complex cash driven consumer non agrarian society have drastically reduced their number of children. With more jobs then people wages trend higher so to counter this the oligarchs allow cheap imigrant labor to penetrate the borders. What started out as mostly as seasonal migrant farm workers, has evolved into domestic service and yard work, then sweat shop and factory work, next it was construction work and building trades. etc.
The tide could be dramatically changed with some convictions of the top CEO's (from garment, meat processing, big agra, etc. industries) from violations of illegal hirelings. If average people saw huge fines and jail sentences for the CEO's this would instill true fear in their hearts and consciousness and they too would reconsider hiring and undocumented "Jose" for their domestic needs.
This will not happen as long as the elite powerbroker s deem it to their advantage to have the political plus of demonizing and scapegoating the desperate immigrants job seekers on one hand and having cheap undemanding labor (no healthcare, no lawsuits, no union noise) on the other.
Oh, and they will continue to be antiabortion as it gives them a second polictical advantage with the common man and fundamentalists and the added advantage of increasing the population so there will again be a permanent condition of more job seekers, then jobs.
With said demonization comes public fear and just like AmeX's foreign policy, the solutions offered are all variations of some time of hyper aggressive law inforcement/paramilitary arrangement with cops, sheriffs, highway protrol, border patrol, army - along with the secondary gurad of courts, prosecutors, jails and prisons i.e. the military-industrial-congressional-prison complex.
If more money can be made by building and imprisoning immigrants it will be done and they will serve as good tennats until they are replaced by the hordes of polictical prisoners that will be available when the next gear of facism is engaged .... which seems to be now almost automatic as we decend into the darkness of self destruction!
Desperation and worsening conditions in the Latin American countries drive migration. The "elites" - the wealthy and powerful capitalists - can hire people cheaper south of the border. They don't want workers to be free to move around and seek better conditions - they prefer closed borders and trapped and desperate workers.
Capital (wealthy people) moves across borders seeking the cheapest labor and the most repressive political conditions. Labor (all of us, poor people) moves across borders to escape repression and seek higher wages and better conditions. We oppose the first and support the second - always. If not, we are working against our own interests, we are aiding our opponents and hastening our own demise.
It is sad about the prison system. But this film is propaganda. Go to the website also. For one thing, they are flashing the viewer through the video way too quickly. The fact is, illegal immigrants are not the majority of the prison population in the U.S. The majority are citizens of the US. They would have you believe that this is some kind of racist plot, when actually it is just greed.
They throw in the bit with the swastika and white supremacists to insure that viewers will associate this with racism. It is very sad that they are stooping to this.
Sadly, by over over-using swastikas and white supremacists in their props, they lose their credibility. Just like "anti-semitism" has been over used and used as justification for passing unpopular and unfair bills.
A proper analysis of this problem would include raw data and stats on how long they are imprisoned, and how quickly they are returned to whereever they came from.
The fact is, many of us U.S. born citizens are having hard time just getting medical treatment, while many illegal immigrants have Welfare cards. I find this very unjust. I don't know of any sovereign nation that would allow illegal immigrants from the U.S. to openly take advantage of the welfare system that was designed to help the citizens.
Until the 50 million Americans with no insurance are covered, I will stand firmly against illegal immigrants in the u.s.
It is easy for people like Katrina Van der Heuval and many other middle class and upper middle class people to lament the conditions of illegals in the U.S., because they don't have a problem getting health care. The narcissism in the U.S. is palpitating. And that is what it is. There is no empathy or consideration for the millions of people in the U.S. who are citizens and cannot find work and services.
Imagine going into China and demanding they house you and feed you.
I would like to see these illegals helped in some way, but we need to help our own first. Otherwise, we are not a nation.
It's only a moral dilemma for Rothberg and some here on CD. I don't see the "oppression and terrorizing" of illegal immigrants that Two Americas like to preach. In fact, they walk around, pretty much, with impunity.
They keep over-breeding and pouring over the border. Look at fertility rates for Central America/Mexico. I don't see a revolutionary in any of them, just more willing participants for empire.
Let's just get the population of the U.S up to a half billion, hell why not a billion.
We'll see what a wonderful utopia that will be. It's going to be interesting when the SW US goes into permanent drought in 50 years.
Wow.
Human beings! Walking around with impunity! We can't have that. I guess you can tell at a glance what a person's legal status might be, eh? You see them walking around. And you know that they are over-breeding.
Are you an illegal immigrant?
Have you been "oppressed and terrorized"? Can you tell us what it's like or would you rather just proselytize?
Born and raised on the border, bub. I know a thing or two.
Go here to see fertility rates by country: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=31
Fertility rate for the U.S. would be less than the desired 2.1 had it not been for the influx of immigrants -both legal and illegal.
What say you about your precious "human beings" when they've overwhelmed the environment?
Nothing wrong with your being a humanist, everyone needs a religion I guess.