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| The immigration crunch |
| By Sarah Etter, News Reporter |
| Published: 10/16/2006 |
Last week, GOP leaders vowed to stand firm on immigration
(Indiana House GOP pledges crackdown on illegal immigrants), while U.S. House and Senate negotiators approved a $1.9 billion slice of the Homeland Security budget to enhance border security. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R, Tennessee) set the stage for a vote to erect a fence along one-third of the US-Mexico border.
For the last year the immigration debate has picked up heat and fervor with protests by immigrant workers, lawmakers debating new and old policies, and many American citizens voicing their opposition to a soft-on-illegal-immigration attitude. For corrections, however, the issue is entirely different. As politicians battle it out on Capital Hill, many states are worried about the facility crunch they might face until things are settled. The influx of jailed illegal immigrants could strain already stretched-thin local, state, and federal facilities. “These immigration issues are leading to major overcrowding in corrections,” says John Keeley, director of communications for the Center for Immigration Studies (http://www.cis.org/), a non-profit immigration research think-tank. “We're seeing the construction of new prisons, and they are being filled as soon as they are built. Some of these prisons for illegal aliens become overpopulated by 60 to 70 percent the minute they open.” According to Keeley, Immigrations and Custom Enforcement officials are now enforcing worksite raids which have resulted in even more arrest of illegal workers. However, many contend that these raids might just be convenient photo-ops for upcoming local and state elections and that all this attention to immigration is just another vote-getting tactic. “Immigration has been plagued by a lack of resources, and most of what comes out of this Administration's mouth is rhetoric,” says Mike Cutler, a CIS fellow, who frequently testifies before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and talks on CNN about immigration topics. “But I bet anything that once these elections are over, the topic will be dropped. After November, you'll hear nothing more about it.” “Let's put this into context,” he continues. “New York City is one of the safer big cities in America because although there are 8 million residents and any number of tourists at any given time, there are also 37,000 police officers. That number is interesting because we only have about 3,000 officers patrolling most of the border between Texas and Mexico. You have to ask if we've even tried immigration enforcement at the border. It appears to me that we have not.” Meanwhile, private corrections companies are constructing new prisons to house the influx of immigrant inmates. Corrections Corporation of America, for example, recently constructed new facilities in Texas and surrounding states, and some migrants are being housed in federal facilities. According to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson Michelle Lyons, the TDCJ is maxed out as it is, regardless of the government's decision on this topic. She says her facilities hold about 11,000 foreign-born offenders. “We are currently in the process of working with INS to determine which of the 11,000 inmates that we have arrested are illegal. We are not sure if they are illegal or not. They just claim a foreign country. Because of capacity issues, we aren't contracting with the federal government to house these inmates,” she explains. Cutler sees a problem with the situation and the administration's solutions. “You have an administration in place right now that doesn't want to spend money on immigration unless it is to give money to companies in the private sector,” he adds. “These politicians want to be in two places at the same time. They want to tell the American public what they want to hear, but they don't want to fix the problem at the border.” Cutler might have a point. In recent months, the stock value of many private corrections companies. CCA, for example, has seen exceptional success in places like California (Prison company stock rises on Gov. Schwarzenegger's declaration). As a result, its stock value has almost tripled in the last four months. The CCA did not return Correction.com's calls for comment. While it seems that the private sector is profiting from this problem, public facilities cannot bear the brunt of additional immigrants on their own. “Overall, our illegal immigrant population is more than 12 million,” says Keeley. “With that volume, we're going to put remarkable stress on our penal system to deal with this problem legally.” But states are trying. North Carolina has participated in an ICE plan that helps deputies identify and detain illegal immigrants who are obviously breaking the law. Tennessee is attempting to model that approach, but critics say this will only lead to further overcrowding as federal facilities cannot transfer these inmates fast enough. Both North Carolina and Tennessee estimate that by enforcing stricter laws for illegal immigrants, three to four thousand more inmates would deluge their system annually. Those numbers are even higher in border states like Texas and California. While no easy answer seems to exist just yet, members of the Texas Minuteman Project are proactively handling Mexican border issues on their own. “When you're actually sitting at the border, you can see how absolutely everyone is trying to defeat our law enforcement. Anyone attempting to cross illegally just waits for the border patrol to pass by, and then they make a run for it,” explains Minuteman President Shannon McGauly. The Minutemen are a non-violent, unarmed group consisting of more than 15,000 retired corrections officers, law enforcement officials and military veterans. “We aren't experts at capturing and detaining people, because we aren't doing that. We just use our eyes and we want to help the patrol,” McGauly explains. Keeley expects to see more groups like this forming. “This issue is so prominent and so deep, that I think civic uprising could definitely occur. My concern is that if Washington remains at a standstill and conditions worsen, we may start to see civic uprisings that are not peaceful. I don't know how much longer we will see peaceful vigilance, like the Minutemen, before we see some sort of retribution. People can only feel unprotected by their government for so long before they take matters into their own hands,” he says. McGauly says it doesn't make sense to the break the law while trying to catch people who break the law. “We've never been involved in a violent conflict, and we don't plan to be,” he adds. The Minutemen continue to patrol the border nightly. McGauly, who has seen Mexico's drug cartels attempt to smuggle entire trucks of contraband over the border, says they are desperately needed. “We want to help the border patrol. We also want an extra 50,000 border patrol agents. They have 200 agents covering 5,000 miles right now. They might have added 25 agents now since we've complained [about a lack of resources]. We have a 2,000 mile border and we can't cover the southern border,” he says. “If someone tries to cross the border from Mexico to America, they get a free ride back. If we sneak over there, it's a two year prison sentence. We need real laws and real action, not nonsense.” Keeley's organization wants to see a policy of attrition. He says cracking down on those employers who hire illegal immigrants and giving the border patrol reasonable resources should help. “But there really is no silver bullet. This crisis has been many years in the making. The finger of blame is at Congress, in particular, and the states are left to grapple with it individually,” Keeley says. McGauly would like to see military at the border, as well as a guest worker program that allows immigrants to work in the US for three years before being sent back to their original countries. “I think it's a fair proposition,” he says. “They can come here, work like they want to, save their money, go back and use that money to buy a house in Mexico.” Cutler, meanwhile, believes politicians can make a real change by enforcing policy. “If our politicians finally grew some spines and decency, we'd get real immigration enforcement. Law enforcement has to be based on the concept of deterrence,” he claims. “We have to make punishment the greatest certainty. People have to realize there's a very good chance they are going to get caught illegally immigrating to the United States. We don't have the manpower or the jail space right now, so we have a catch and release policy instead, but it just has to change.” Sarah Etter is a reporter for Corrections.com. Email her at setter@corrections.com |
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