by Jorge Mújica Murias
Fernando Lara was going to get married on April 26, 2008, but his wedding it’s been postponed… indefinitely. The 15 thousand dollars him and his wife to be, along with their families had already spent, are lost.
Two days before his wedding, Fernando went to O’Hare airport, in Chicago, to pick up his father and grandmother. His father came out half an hour after the flight landed, but not his grandmother, a venerable lady of 80. After another half an hour, Fernando asked about her to the immigration officers. Their only response was to ask him for an ID and immigration papers. Fernando has been in immigration detention ever since, while his deportation is processed.
His fiancée and his mother wanted to immediately buy an airplane ticket and take it to immigration, to ask them to take hem directly to the airport and deport him. The couple decided, the first time Fernando was able to call from jail, that they rather go back to Mexico.
But there’s no go. Immigration refuses to set him free, to assign him a bond to pay (maybe because of the flying risk?,) and he is still in jail.
The reason for all this seem to go well beyond reason: keeping immigrants in jail is a big business.
By the end of 2007 there were, according to the George Bush regime, some 27 thousand immigrants in detention. Per night, as if they were in some good hotel, somebody is pocketing about 95 dollars, for a grand total of about a billion dollars a year.
Two companies, Corrections Corporation of America, and the Geo Group, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections, which already have the concession of 8 of the 16 federal detention centers in the United Stares, are launching an aggressive campaign to privatize the rest of the jail system.
As a matter of fact, since the government announced more aggressive raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants, the declared intention was not to build more jails, but to rent and give them out in concession to private parties. Already the county authorities, which keep in their jails about 57 percent of all detained undocumented “aliens”, have their jails managed by private companies.
Maybe they are not even related, but a woman by the name of Louise Gilchrist, same last name of one of the founders of the Minuteman Project, spokesperson for Corrections Corp., says they could provide “all beds Immigration my ever need.”
Less immigrants, more money
Curiously enough, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, the crisis in the housing industry and related jobs caused the number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico to fall in around 50 thousand last year.
It is important to make this clear, because part of the strategy of new jails, increased raids and deportations is not focusing on border crossers, but on those already inside the United States. Why bother detaining 400 thousand people who sneak in, if you can go after the 12 million already here?
There’s where the list of the 600 thousand “criminals” comes from: from drug dealers to people who lost their legalization, adjustment or asylum cases, for whom Immigration already has names and addresses, and from all the “OTM’s”, Other Than Mexicans, title given by the Migra to all undocumented immigrants who are not from Mexico and have been detained but set free because is not as easy to deport them immediately.
This strategy allows the Migra to have “clients” almost permanently, and despite the market exchange going down because of oil prices and other economic problems, shares of Geo and Corrections are going up at a fast pace. From February to date, when Bush announced his new strategy, Corrections shares went up from $42.50 to $53.77, a 27 percent gain, while the shares of Geo went up from $23.36 to $39.24. A “modest” 68 percent in a few months.
At this point, it is only fair to state that living in the United States without papers is still not a crime, despite Republican Jim Sensenbrenner and Democrat Shuler putting all their efforts into it. It is still an administrative fault, but that category plays against undocumented immigrants caught by the Migra. Fernando and many others have to wait in jail for long periods of time without a lawyers being immediately assigned to them. In some cases, they are not even allowed to make phone calls to get in contact with their families or private lawyers.
In closing, undocumented immigrants are “contributing”, albeit not willingly, to the economy of the United Status even in the Migra jails. Resides taxes, contributions to the Social Security, Medicare and who knows what else, and the faithful payments every April 15 without the right to unemployment, pensions and other benefits, undocumented immigrants are “helping” some entrepreneurs to get richer. As Judith Greene, Director of the research group Justice Strategies says, “Privatization of jails for immigrants is part of the American entrepreneurial spirit of this country, but frankly this is an ill spirit.”
Oh, and the next México del Norte, I promise, Hill be on the 60 undocumented immigrant who have died in the Migra jails … don’t miss it!
Lea “México del Norte” en Internet: http://mx.groups.yahoo.com/group/mexicodelnorte.
