Week 7 - A01 - Jarrod Baniqued

Week 7 (16 February 2019)
Jarrod Baniqued
This week, I read Refugees, Rights, and Race: How Legal Status Shapes Liberian Immigrants’ Relationship with the State by Hana E. Brown, and The criminalization of immigration and the privatization of the immigration detention: implications for justice by Alissa Ackerman and Rich Furman. As you can tell, both deal with how the state and its justice system deal with immigration.
With the recent border security spending deal having been concluded, journalists in the United States have brought up the fact that the package affects much more than the wall—it also calls for a massive expansion of immigration detention centers. The Trump administration has championed private prison company takeovers of these centers, according to Livia Luan of the Migration Policy Institute and Daniel Moattar of The American Prospect, so it stands to reason that companies such as CCA and Geo Group, as well as Aramark which supplies food, hygiene, uniforms, and medical and cleaning supplies to prisons, would see the deal as a boon.
With that in mind, let me summarize the Ackerman and Furman article. The article’s thesis is that immigrants are becoming some of the most vulnerable populations to violence, family separation, poor mental health, and abuses by private prison owners. Said owners of for-profit prisons started cozying up to state governments, who were assuming certain immigration oversight duties from the federal government, and making them view immigrants as less than human, through huge donations to candidates for state office, intense lobbying against prison population reduction bills, and a coalition of big businesses and extreme-right think tanks called ALEC, with the goal of writing alternative bills in state legislatures to maintain their interests. This new targeting of immigrants over native private prisoners was because said companies faced a long-term decline of the private prison population.
Immigrants in privately-run detention centers, especially since the rise of the Tea Party movement and nativist sentiments in border states in 2010, face menial, often dangerous jobs while not having the same rights as full citizens, as well as improperly-trained professionals who have poor intercultural communication skills and reluctance to follow up after their release, being ostracized by society and cut off from programs bolstering their family-centered support networks across nations, and the aforementioned risk of family separation, violence, and poor mental health.
To summarize the Brown article, refugees are treated much differently from undocumented immigrants in terms of support from public services. They have more such support and are more likely to report crimes or talk to public health workers. Yet they have as much difficulty navigating the American ethnic hierarchy and relating to African American descendants of sharecroppers. This is complicated by the historical ties between the United States and Liberia for refugees from the latter’s civil war. Brown’s analysis of the claims-making strategies of these refugees suggest that rather than fearing state support, Liberian refugees have a more positive view of their host government, while simultaneously distancing themselves from the interests of African American descendants of antebellum slaves, whom they view as lazy, and taking advantage of their refugee status to gain privilege over undocumented immigrants.
Reflecting on this, I think it’s important to put documentation in perspective. It makes or breaks immigrants' lives. The most important lesson to draw from this is that state support for immigrants, refugees or not, not only ensures that they integrate successfully, but also engenders unhealthily prejudiced attitudes towards the undocumented. This is obviously immoral. While more state support is needed, policymakers need to be more nuanced in how to go about it. Knowing that our President tends to lump refugees and undocumented immigrants together as dangers to America, he doesn't care much for this.
I also believe that private prison companies are an inhumane temporary solution to undocumented immigrants. As noted, the border security deal calls for an expansion of privately-run detention centers, which could prove a boon for prison companies. But it also calls for a reduced backlog of cases through more immigration judges, according to Priscilla Alvarez for CNN. This latter provision is the first step in the right direction to solving the immigration system's major issues. What should follow is a commitment by the Trump administration to ban lobbying by private prison contractors and limit their political donations. But knowing who he is, that obviously won't happen.
I'm not an expert on immigration policy (ironic considering who my parents are), but I do know that a small majority of undocumented immigrants (my SAPSA video is about those from Asia) are overstaying their visas, either due to not knowing when their visa runs out while being attached to their job, or due to health reasons. A pathway to citizenship, with the starting requirements being fluency in English, a clean criminal record, a post-secondary degree or certificate, and proof against tax evasion, is what needs to be implemented.
The simple fact of the matter is that robust public education and immigration courts, with proper consideration of undocumented immigrants as humans and as future, deserving American citizens, can be a better investment than the current system of over-investing in less humane prisons. Basic statistics have borne this out: According to Jaden Urbi at CNBC, the DHS recently estimated that a bed for a child at "juvenile centers", or ICE-run temporary housing for children only, costs $139.40 a day, or about $50,881 a year. According to the DHS and Lance Izumi writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, public education alone costs on average $12,028 per undocumented pupil a year.

Image: A migrant children's tent camp in Tornillo, Texas. Taken early June 2018 by Mike Blake for Reuters.

Questions: Will the Democratic presidential candidates properly challenge President Trump on his championing of privatizing detention centers? Will they talk about his acceptance of their companies' donations?
When will immigration courts be placed under the jurisdiction of the judicial branch?
Is the Liberian refugee experience (and the Filipino immigrant experience, seeing as both countries's histories are very intertwined with America's) different from the experiences of refugees from countries without that layer of American closeness?
Sources:
Readings:
Ackerman, A. R. and Furman, R. (2013). The Criminalization of Immigration and the Privatization of the Immigration Detention: Implications for Justice.
Brown, H. (2011). Refugees, Rights, and Race: How Legal Status Shapes Liberian Immigrants' Relationship with the State. Social Problems, 58(1), 144-163. doi:10.1525/sp.2011.58.1.144
News articles:
Alvarez, P. (2019, February 14). What the spending bill does and doesn't do on immigration. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/politics/immigration-spending-bill-wall-ice/index.html
Elinson, Z. (2018, July 02). Trump's Immigrant-Detention Plans Benefit Private Prison Operators. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-immigrant-detention-plans-benefit-these-companies-1530523800
Izumi, L. T. (2017, March 20). Educating illegal immigrants is costly. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/educating-illegal-immigrants-costly/Iafsqvt6ydowmSvgX9C4TM/
Luan, L. (2018, May 16). Profiting from Enforcement: The Role of Private Prisons in U.S. Immigration Detention. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/profiting-enforcement-role-private-prisons-us-immigration-detention
Moattar, D. (2018, December 20). Texas Detention Players Ramp Up Trump's For-Profit 'Baby Jails'. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://prospect.org/article/texas-detention-players-ramp-trump’s-profit-baby-jails
Urbi, J. (2018, June 21). This is how much it costs to detain an immigrant in the US. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/cost-us-immigrant-detention-trump-zero-tolerance-tents-cages.html (also image source)