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Immigration

Top Immigration Opponent Trashes Rubio With Slur

STUDY: Pathway To Citizenship Will Provide $832 billion in GDP

Immigrant Detainees Forced to Pay $20 for Five-Minute Phone Call

Justice

Republicans With Influence On Immigration Debate Are Top Recipients Of Private Prison Contributions

By Nicole Flatow on Feb 21, 2013 at 4:30 pm

As the immigration reform debate heats up, private prison executives have made it clear that they are monitoring how it will affect their rates of incarceration. During a call with investors last week, Corrections Corporation of America CEO assured investors that there will “always be demand for beds”, reflecting concern that incarceration rates will actually go down. With many elements of reform left on the negotiating table, the Columbia Journalism Review is showing just how much money the two major private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, have invested in the outcome:

Some of the politicians who have benefited most from this largesse are influential Senators who are now playing key roles in shaping proposed immigration reform legislation.

Among members of Congress, the top two recipients of contributions from CCA are its home-state senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker of Tennessee. The Republican lawmakers, each of whom has received more than $50,000 from CCA according to data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, represent important swing votes for advancing a reform bill through the Senate. Another top CCA recipient is Arizona Republican John McCain, who has gotten $32,146 from CCA and is a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that is working to draft legislation. His fellow Gang of Eight member, Marco Rubio, ranks among the top recipients of contributions from the Florida-based GEO Group, receiving $27,300 in donations over the course of his career.

In recent years, each of these senators has sponsored bills that would have increased the detention and incarceration of immigrants. Legislation put forward by Alexander in 2009, for example, would have provided for “increased alien detention facilities.” And a 2011 bill cosponsored by McCain and Rubio sought to expand Operation Streamline, a federal enforcement program that makes illegal entry a criminal offense in some jurisdictions.

Skyrocketing immigration detention numbers are attributable in part to programs like Operation Streamline and Secure Communities, which link criminal activity to immigration status. But they are also linked to record deportations, as many facing removal are subject to mandatory detention while proceedings are pending, leaving judges no discretion to decide whether to release them.

A McCain spokesman told CJR that McCain stands by Operation Streamline, and that he expects it to continue whether or not comprehensive immigration is implemented “because it works.” According to ColorLines, Democratic staffers are concerned that negotiations will lead to an expansion of Operation Streamline and other programs that detain and criminalize immigrants in exchange for support on other core elements of reform.

Immigration detention has more than doubled private prison profits since 1995, and these corporations have not been shy about using their influence to lobby for incarceration-friendly policies, despite claims from both Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group that they do not take official positiions on issues. Those sentenced for immigration offenses make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the United States’ overflowing federal prison population.

Five Unlikely Supporters Of Comprehensive Immigration Reform

By Rebecca Leber on Feb 21, 2013 at 2:42 pm

Most Americans back a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, which is a key component in both the Senate bipartisan framework and the president’s plan.

But an earned path to citizenship has drawn support from unexpected sources, too. A number of Tea Party lawmakers, evangelicals, and conservative leaders are part of the growing momentum calling for comprehensive immigration reform to include citizenship:

1. Rand Paul
In his response to the State of the Union, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said the Tea Party, “must be the party that says, ‘If you want to work, if you want to become an American, we welcome you.”‘ Paul first embraced an “eventual path” to citizenship for undocumented immigrants after the 2012 election, though his past positions include wanting to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants. Marco Rubio, another Tea Party favorite, also endorses citizenship.

2. Grover Norquist
Grover Norquist has led the right’s anti-tax fights on the fiscal cliff and sequester, but he is a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. “Texas is a voice on making sure the center-right movement — conservatives, Republicans, Americans — are seen properly on this issue,” Norquist said earlier in February. “We’re getting past this sense that conservatives are supposed to be anti-immigrant.”

3. Fox News Chief Roger Ailes
In an interview with The New Republic Fox News chief Roger Ailes said, “I think the word ‘illegal immigration’ is a false name. We should all defend sovereignty, then take a Judeo-Christian approach to immigration. I don’t have any problem with a path to citizenship.” Though Ailes’ motives are unclear — he said in the same interview Latinos are a “tremendous business opportunity” for the network — Fox News personalities have considerably softened their commentary on immigration reform, notably Sean Hannity. “You create a pathway for those people that are here — you don’t say you’ve got to go home,” Hannity said in November. “And that is a position that I’ve evolved on.”

4. Conservative evangelicals
Focus on the Family joined joined other conservative evangelicals, traditionally the least supportive of comprehensive reform, to campaign for “compassionate and just treatment of immigrants.” In November, the Evangelical Immigration Table sent an open letter to Congress requesting citizenship or legalization for undocumented immigrants. According to a 2010 Public Religion Research Institute poll, evangelicals support reform with citizenship by a margin of 2-1. Six years ago, Pew found a majority of white evangelicals viewed immigration as a threat. Now, evangelical leaders cite a new understanding of the Bible as the reason for the shift.

5. Border State Republicans
Republicans from the state with the nation’s fifth-highest Latino population became the first state GOP party to endorse comprehensive immigration with a clear path to citizenship. Party officials said the GOP’s hard line on immigration reform conflicts with the “party’s historic commitment to civil rights.” Though many Texas Republicans have yet to officially come forward, there is a Democratic-sponsored resolution in the House urging Congress to “swiftly enact and fund comprehensive immigration reform that creates a road map to citizenship.”

Security

Mexican Government Aided Drug Cartels And Participated In Kidnappings, Report Reveals

By Hayes Brown on Feb 21, 2013 at 1:56 pm

Security forces in the Mexican government may have been cooperating to facilitate hundreds of “enforced disappearances” of citizens as part of the failing struggle to rein in drug gangs, according to a new report.

Mexico has been steeped in a conflict with drug cartels for the last six years, resulting in the death of over 50,000 Mexican civilians. During the course of that conflict, hundreds of civilians have gone missing — or “disappeared” — and are presumed to be dead. Prominent NGO Human Rights Watch, in their report titled “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Legacy Ignored,” alleges that the government of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón has not only failed to bring disappearances under control, but actively taken part in some instances:

Human Rights Watch has documented nearly 250 such “disappearances” that have occurred since 2007. In more than 140 of these cases, evidence suggests that these were enforced disappearances—meaning that state agents participated directly in the crime, or indirectly through support or acquiescence. These crimes were committed by members of every security force involved in public security operations, sometimes acting in conjunction with organized crime. In the remaining cases, we were not able to determine based on available evidence whether state actors participated in the crime, though they may have.

The report goes on to describe several of those disappearances in-depth, including the beatings by local police, detentions by federal police, and possible shootings ordered by the Navy. Calderon’s war on the cartels did not go as planned, with actions to rein in fighting between organized crime rings instead leading to greater bloodshed. By conquering all elements of crime and supplanting the government, the Zetas — the largest of the cartels — currently controls the third-largest state in Mexico.

In the end, Human Rights Watch urged newly sworn-in President Peña Nieto to take action to reverse the policies of his predecessor. “While disappearances may have started on Calderón’s watch, they did not end with his term,” Human Rights Watch Americas Director José Miguel Vivanco said in a release. In a visit to the White House in November, Nieto pledged to reduce violence within his country, without offering details on how.

Instability in Mexico is finally making its way into the politics of the United States, though in the context of border security and immigration reform rather than the war on drugs. During a town hall meeting, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) faced down a constituent who said invading Mexico was necessary to “clean up the cartels.” Despite the worries of many conservatives, the achieved nearly all of the targets for border enforcement in 2007, with 81 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border now meeting one of the top three levels of “operational control” by U.S. enforcement officials.

Indentured Servitude? GOP Lawmaker Wants To Tether Immigrants To ‘The Dirtiest Jobs’

By Igor Volsky on Feb 21, 2013 at 9:23 am

A top conservative in the House of Representatives told NPR Thursday morning that he opposes bipartisan proposals to allow undocumented immigrants to earn a path to citizenship, but would support expanding “a guest-worker program for immigrant-labor-dependent U.S. agriculture” to ensure that farms have a steady stream of foreign labor to fulfill the “dirtiest jobs.”

The Senate’s bipartisan framework for immigration reform includes a separate track for agricultural workers, allowing them to “earn a path to citizenship through a different process under our new agricultural worker program” and lawmakers had previously considered proposals “that would provide agricultural employers with a stable, legal labor force while protecting farmworkers from exploitative working conditions.”

In light of current proposals for earned citizenship, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is concerned that legalized agricultural workers will take opportunity of their legal status to abandon back-breaking agricultural work and find jobs elsewhere, leaving farmers without a stable stream of labor.

“You’re going to have to have a program that assures those farms and those processing plants that there will be workers,” he says. “Because if you give them legal status, they can work anywhere in the United States — they’re not going to necessarily work at the hardest, toughest, dirtiest jobs.”

Immigration reform, then, could include a compromise that requires agricultural workers to remain in the industry for a pre-determined period of time and a new temporary worker program that ensures a constant supply of farm workers.

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