U.S. citizens express their discontent with illegal immigrants:
Is the gravy train of benefits that encourage anti-immigrant
sentiment finally reaching the end of the line?
Illegal Immigration:
Cruelty, Xenophobia and U.S. Business (La Jornada,
Mexico)
"The criminalization
of undocumented migration in the United States and the violations of human
rights that accompany it, is a strategy that results in enormous political,
economic and corporate profit, the very existence of which contradicts the founding
principles of that country."
Julia Ojeda, left, comforts her daughter, at a march against deportation, family separation, and workplace raids in Phoenix, AZ. Ojeda's husband is in custody after being arrested in a workplace raid.
According to official
reports divulged by The New York Times,
some 300 undocumented migrants a day are subject to solitary confinement in U.S.
prisons on orders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE for short). This
happens in spite of the fact that such people have not been jailed for criminal
offences, but for civil ones, which under the laws of our neighboring country,
don't even merit punishment. Their detentions are a means of ensuring that they
appear at administrative hearings. Out of this figure, half, or some 150, are
kept in solitary confinement for 75 days or more, which according to
psychiatric experts cited by the newspaper, multiplies the risk of severe
mental damage for the detainees.
Beyond the intrinsic cruelty of laws currently in force in
our neighboring country under which migrants are persecuted - laws that
criminalize foreigners for coming to the U.S. in search of work or a better
life than what their countries of origin offer - inhumane practices like this
one have various contextual elements that must be examined.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
The first is the structural hypocrisy of prosecuting
undocumented aliens even as they constitute an indispensable element in the
functioning of the U.S. economy. In particular, they add to its competitiveness
through the very low wages they receive. They, in turn, are used by agriculture,
industry and services as a valve limiting pressure on salaries from U.S.
workers.
Another is the paranoid and xenophobic and discourse that
has sustained social backing for anti-migrant legal measures that for decades
has been regularly fanned by politicians and political candidates, particularly
but not exclusively those of the Republican Party. But that is beginning to
change thanks to the rise of the Latin American electorate and its growing
clout in shaping the superpower's political map. Indeed, in the last presidential
election, the so-called Hispanic vote was critical to Barack Obama's
re-election.
A third element that cannot be overlooked is the lucrative
business that gives rise to these persecutory legal measures against migrants.
It is well known that every year, U.S. authorities apprehend some 400,000
migrants of various nationalities and detain in private prisons - mainly those
operated by Corrections
Corporation of America, The Geo Group and
the Management
and Training Corp. The companies charge federal institutions a fixed fee
for each detainee ($122 per day in the case of the GEO Group) and, according to
human rights organizations, stage a permanent federal and state legislative lobbying
effort to ensure that undocumented immigration remains criminalized. Significantly,
in the last decade, profits at these businesses rose on average 100 percent, and
according to the humanitarian group Immigrants for Sale,
their combined annual revenues reached $5 billion.
As you can see, the criminalization of undocumented migration
in the United States and the violations of human rights that accompany it, is a
strategy that results in enormous political, economic and corporate profit, the
very existence of which contradicts the founding principles of that country. While
the volume of this business makes resistance to immigration reform easier to
understand, such reform is socially and ethically imperative.
