Cheney, Gonzales, Vanguard Group in "Prisonville"

Private prison corporations are a good place to put money – if you are interested in making good money from companies that imprison people for profit. As the two leading private prison firms like to tell investors, it’s a booming business these days not because crime rates are rising but because of the new opportunities in immigrant detention.

So it’s not surprising that Vanguard Group, one of the country’s largest mutual funds companies, puts its investors money into private prison firms, including the country’s two largest: Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (originally incorporated as Wackenhut). Vanguard Group is also a major investor in Correctional Services Corporation.

Willacy County, Texas is the epicenter of the private prison phenomenon that is sweeping the country, fueled in recent years by the immigrant crackdown. Over the past three years, over 3,000 new “prison beds” have come on line in Raymondville, the county seat, as politicians and Texas developers have attempted to cash in on the federal government’s demand for prison space for detained immigrants. The largest operator is the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, although GEO Group also has prison operations in Raymondville, commonly called “Prisonville” by locals.

The recent indictments of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for private prison-related crimes highlighted the controversial role of private prisons in immigrant detention. The indictments were filed by outgoing County Attorney Juan Angel Guerra but have not yet been signed by the county judge.

Cheney is charged organized criminal activity related to the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, while Gonzales is charged with using his position as attorney general to stop investigations of prisoner abuse at private prisons in the country. Also indicted are GEO Corp, state Sen. Eddie Lucio (profiting from public office by accepting honoraria), two district judges, and a former U.S. attorney.

The country’s largest private prison company, CCA, has no business in Willacy County. However, County Attorney Guerra had protested the country contracts with Management and Training Corporation, contending that CCA would be a better partner for the country. In particular, he charged that Senator Lucio was lobbying for MTC and, as a private prison consultant, was benefiting from his favoring the Utah firm.

For more on Willacy County and private prisons, see an excellent report in the Texas Observer by Forrest Wilder. http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2320

Photo: Private Prison in Raymondville

Remove Illegals, Contract Temporaries

Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Michael Chertoff made clear in his wrap-up speech on the “State of Immigration” that comprehensive immigration reform should include a three-pronged strategy of strict enforcement, border security, and immigrant worker programs.

Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, have objected to employee verification programs because they cost businesses time and money. Noting this opposition, Chertoff retorted: “In my experience, making money is not a sufficient justification for violating the law, since most people break the law in order to make money.”

But he readily acknowledged that enforcement-only is not the answer. “I think it would be a lot easier if we said to businesses if we can work together to have a legal way to get the workers, that is a win-win. You get the workers, the workers get protected, and we are obeying the law.” What’s needed, he said, is “comprehensive immigration reform that addresses the issue of temporary workers.”

Chertoff said:

“It is our philosophy, it is my personal philosophy that the answer to dealing with the problem of jobs that Americans do not seem to want to fill, is not to allow people to come in illegally, to break the law to fill them, but to create a regulated legal, visible and secure path, to invite people in when we want to invite them in, under the terms and conditions that satisfies us as Americans, that we are comfortable with the security and the economic impact of that migration in that temporary work, and also using a path that is transparent and protects the workers themselves from the kind of exploitation some of them experience when they come in an illegal status.”

There is simplicity to Chertoff’s proposal missing from other comprehensive immigration reform proposals. Rather than address the complexities of a “pathway to citizenship” or “earned citizenship,” Chertoff simply ignores the entire issue of possible citizenship for the 11-12 million illegal immigrants, focusing exclusively on temporary work programs as the legal path for new foreign workers.

In its simplicity – enforcement plus temporary worker program – Chertoff’s proposal for comprehensive reform lays out only two options for illegal immigrants – removal or temporary work permits.

This solution suddenly looked more possible when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that any solution would have to be bipartisan, which would mean sacrificing some of Democrats' past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

"Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally," Pelosi said. "I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn't," she said.

If there is no pathway to citizenship, immigrants now in the country illegally can expect increasingly precarious lives. Only if they sign up for a temporary or guest worker program will illegal immigrants likely be permitted to stay in the country. But most illegal immigrants don’t work in industries, such as agriculture, that have traditionally been included in temporary worker programs.

Immigration restrictionists, while pleased that “pathway to citizenship” proposals seem to be losing support even among Democrats, are already preparing their forces to do battle against a broad new temporary workers program that would possibly give worker visas to current illegal immigrants and to new flows of foreign workers.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, for example, has incorporated a response to a Chertoff-like proposal to expand temporary worker programs. In FAIR’s newly released Seven Principles of True Comprehensive Immigration Reform, one of its reform principles states: “Redefining illegal aliens as ‘guest-workers’ or anything else is just that: a redefinition that attempts to hide the fact it is an amnesty, not reform.”

While acknowledging that there may be some need for temporary workers in the U.S. economy, FAIR aims to wage battle on the benchmarks Congress and the new administration set for determining the need for foreign workers. Rather than relying on employers or even the government to document a shortage of workers, FAIR says that “the need for guest workers must be determined by objective indicators that a shortage of workers exists, i.e., extreme wage inflation in a particular sector of the labor market.”

In other words, unless businesses can show that they are paying exorbitant wages to attract labor, any plea for foreign workers should be rejected. Echoing the language of many unions and progressives, FAIR, in its principles for comprehensive immigration reform, declares: “Immigration policy should not be permitted to undermine opportunities for America's poor and vulnerable citizens to improve their working conditions and wages.”

Immigrant Supply and Demand

Political imperatives – protecting the homeland and enforcing the “rule of law” – are seeking to prevail over prevailing over the forces of supply and demand in the transborder labor market. Although the immigrant labor market persists, the increased risks for both employer and worker, along with the recessionary economy, appear to be exercising downward pressure on supply and demand. But the immigrant crackdown has invigorated other market forces. The criminalizing of illegal immigrants and the end of the practice of “catch and release” for non-Mexicans picked up along the border have sparked a demand for prison beds for immigrants. Eager to cash in on the immigrant crackdown, private prison firms and local governments are rushing to supply Homeland Security and the Justice Department with the prisons needed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants captured by ICE and Border Patrol agents. In the prison industry, bed is a euphemism for a place behind bars. Even President Bush talks the prison bed language when discussing immigration policy. When visiting the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas in 2006 to promote the immigrant crackdown, the president said: “Beds are our number one priority.”

At the insistence of immigration restrictionists like Cong. Tom Tancredo (R –Col.), the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 contained an authorization for 40,000 prison beds for ICE detainees – double what was then available.

DHS says it can guarantee the availability of a bed for any immigrant in its care. At the onset of the immigration crackdown two years ago, ICE dubbed its promise to find a detention center or prison bed for all arrested immigrants "Operation Reservation Guaranteed." That operation has been subsumed into ICE's Detention Operations Coordination Center. The Justice Department has a similar initiative to ensure that the U.S. Marshals Service has beds available for detainees—about 180,000 a year, of whom more than 30% are held on immigration charges.

Most of the prison beds contracted by ICE and DOJ’s Office of Federal Detention Trustee are with local governments; ICE has more than 300 intergovernmental agreements with county and city governments to hold immigrants, while DOJ has some 1200 such agreements. In many cases, particularly with contracts for hundreds of prison beds, the local government then subcontracts with a private prison company to operate the facility.

Prison beds translate into per diem payments from the federal government that are well above the hotel room rates in the remote rural communities where most of these immigrant prisons are located. With these per diems running from $70 to $95 for each immigrant imprisoned, local governments and private firms are rushing to expand existing facilities or to create new ones.

Earlier this year Cong. Tancredo, a leading immigration restrictionist, encouraged the town council of Aurora, Colorado to approve a 400-bed planned expansion for an immigration prison owned by GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corp.), the world’s second largest prison company. "Does anyone think we don't have 1,100 illegal aliens in the area?” he said, “I don't think that there's much to worry about. If there are 1,500 beds available I guarantee you they will be used." Despite opposition from local activists who spoke out against the immigration crackdown and the immigrant detention industry, the expansion is underway.

Mexicans Heading Home

The rural areas of the poorest states in Mexico, notably Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Zacatecas, have been depopulated over the past couple of decades by a massive emigration to the United States. Now, as the U.S. economy sinks and immigration controls tighten, many of those who hoped for a better life on the “other side” of the border are heading home. Mexico’s safety valve is experiencing a reverse flow for the first time since the 1950s when the U.S. ended the Bracero Program. Gabriel Hernández García, the Oaxacan state director of the national campesino organization Antorcha Campesino, says various communities of the Mixteca region of the state are experiencing a massive return of immigrants. The communities of the Tlaxiaco area are being hit particularly hard by this reverse diaspora. According to Hernández, the situation requires an emergency response plan but the phenomenon has the federal and state government totally unprepared. He said that the campo has been totally forgotten by the government, which caused thousands of fellow campesinos to emigrate but now the flow north has reversed itself – not because there is more opportunity in Oaxaca but simply because an increasing number of Oaxacan immigrants are no longer able to pay the rent or buy food in the United States. Compounding the crisis of this massive return of destitute immigrants is the continuing fall in remittances to these villages – creating crisis conditions in the Mixteca. The return of thousands of unemployed will likely intensify the tense political situation in Oaxaca, which has been rocked by protests and government crackdowns over the past few years.

Photo: Protest march in Oaxaca against PRI government.