Immigrants ALL (Humans all? Well...) Part 3

dr. elsewhere here

I do hope this will be my last post on this issue. The responses have left me concerned that the media hype has done its dark magic too well, and even among the smart and compassionate folks like yourselves, one or two of you have fallen under its sway.

Watching Democracy Now! again this morning, as always, and they again focused on this urgent immigration situation. Today, though, they highlighted the drastic changes in immigration policy since 9/11, reminding everyone that there are profits to be made in this business.

Something to keep in mind here: Who benefits and who suffers?

All immigration detention centers, like most jails, in this country have been privatized. One or two among you (you know who you are) might think this is a good thing.

I find it reprehensible, the same way I find privatization of public schools and public utilities and so on reprehensible. Those aspects of the commonwealth should not be owned by anyONE, but by the community they serve, by the citizens who stand to gain and lose by their proper or improper management.

So we see in the privatization of jails and these detention centers the way the profit motive works. The more cells they fill, the more money they make. What is to keep these folks from scratching each other's backs across the various agencies involved??

And who suffers? The innocents.

Consider a woman interviewed this morning by Amy Goodman. Her name is Caroline. She is a young mother, her son only three years old. She was brought to this country at age 4 without papers. She never knew she was illegal. She went to school, was a model student, worked in the police department as a volunteer, and married her high school sweetheart. After her son was born, she decided to become an American citizen. After all, her husband is American, and so is her son. When she arrived for her interview, she was arrested because - unbeknownst to her - she had been officially ordered to deport at age 12. Because she did not have an attorney - the new rules do not provide this basic human right to aliens - she was held in detention for weeks, not allowed to see her son or husband, and then shipped off to Guatamala, a country she cannot even remember anymore. She has not seen her son since the day she was arrested, four months ago, and has no idea how she will ever be able to see him again.

That was only one story. The upshot is that, since 9/11, detention and deportation of illegal immigrants has far exceeded anything we would even grace with the adjective draconian. Most of you have surely heard these horror stories. People being ordered to appear for hearings on dates prior to the postmark on the order. People being deported for the slightest slant in the cross of a T on some form. Deported despite years of upright living and community service and paying taxes and raising families of American citizens, some to countries that will not keep them. Some end up in refugee camps not even in their native countries.

Friends, this is not a small issue; this is not what America is about. One only has to witness the hundreds of thousands of people protesting this administration's police state tactics to see how utterly out of touch this cabal of creeps is. Have you forgotten all those storm trooper stories from the months just after 9/11? They still occur. Are you aware that Homeland Security is building 800 detention camps, just in case? Of what?? The largest corporate detention facility is based in Texas, so we are free to speculate on relations with the dubyuh. These businesses have to turn a profit, so they have to keep those beds full. The monstrous logic of capitalism.

Go here for a very quick and graphic depiction of the point I tried to make yesterday, that corporate America - and we consumers - have done our part to make living conditions in other countries bad enough that our citizens want and often have to leave, and that very consumer cycle of work/consume/work/consume lures them all here for something better. It is incumbent upon us to own our complicity in all this, not to mention recognizing that there but for fortune go all the rest of us. With all the nightmares the reigning idiots have up their sleeves, we each might be begging to emigrate someday, so think about that.

And check out today's Democracy Now! These stories are real, the people are human, all except the monsters in the machinery that are perpetrating such damnable and unAmerican cruelty.