Border Patrol faces little accountability: Shootings by agents are up, but few are held responsible; families and the public rarely learn the outcome of secret, complex investigations

Just two months after a Border Patrol agent shot her 16-year-old son in Nogales, Sonora, Araceli Rodríguez Salazar sensed silence spreading over the case.

"I'm tired of crying. I'm tired of waiting. I want justice," she said on a recent afternoon, standing outside her humble home on a downtown hillside.

If the pattern holds, she'll be waiting much longer.

Even as the number of shootings by agents increases, the system for holding them accountable remains complicated and opaque, leaving the public in the dark about the status of the cases, an Arizona Daily Star investigation has found. One Arizona case has remained secret and "ongoing" for almost three years.

Questions have sharpened after agents shot people who apparently weren't threatening them at least twice in Arizona over the last two years.

Still, agents get the benefit of the doubt from the public and prosecutors, and are rarely criminally charged. In the few cases when agents have been prosecuted in Arizona, they've won.

That may be because the shootings were justified, but the secrecy of the process means the public may never know.

As questions of accountability grow louder, shootings by Border Patrol agents continue - primarily in Arizona. In the last three years agents have shot at least 22 people nationwide. Nine of those cases have been in Southern Arizona - four in the last two months and two just last week.

Last Sunday, a Border Patrol agent in the Baboquivari Mountains killed an apparent illegal immigrant - 19-year-old Guatemalan Margarito Lopez Morelos - who, the agency said, struggled with an agent. On Tuesday, an agent southwest of Gila Bend shot and wounded a man who, the agency said, brandished a weapon.

Since January 2010, there have been at least six cross-border shootings by agents, including the one that killed Rodríguez-Salazar's son, José Antonio Elena Rodríguez. When killed, he was on a sidewalk across the 36-foot-wide street along the border.

Two people were on the border fence when agents arrived at about 11 p.m. Rocks flew, though police reports leave it unclear who threw them, and at least one agent fired into Mexico.

Elena Rodriguez was hit at least seven times - twice in the head and five times in the back. The walls next to him were pocked with bullet holes.

"What would have happened if a Sonoran police officer had opened fire and shot a 16-year-old walking along the street in Arizona?" asked Kat Rodriguez of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a human-rights advocacy group in Tucson. "We all know the response would be very different, and it shouldn't be."

agent ivie's death

Early on Oct. 2, Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie cautiously approached a site east of Bisbee where a ground sensor had gone off. Two fellow agents approached from another direction.

In an apparent accident, Ivie fired at the other agents, striking one, the FBI and Cochise County Sheriff's Department reported. The agent who was struck fired back, killing Ivie.

Amid an outpouring of support for Ivie's family, some found a key aspect of the case troubling: Here was a case where an agent apparently didn't know what he was shooting at.

Border Patrol agents are taught to use deadly force only when they or someone else are threatened with death, agency spokesman Bill Brooks said.. However, officers everywhere must always have "target discrimination" and fire only at the person posing the threat, said Dave Klinger, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

"If I've got a guy shooting at me, I don't get to send rounds downrange at the general area," said Klinger, who himself shot and killed a man when he was a Los Angeles police officer.

The same rules apply to rock-throwing, Klinger and others said. The closer the thrower, the more likely it poses an imminent threat.

On March 21, 2011, an agent shot and killed 19-year-old Carlos LaMadrid in Douglas. Local police had chased LaMadrid to the border fence, where a Border Patrol vehicle collided with the one LaMadrid was driving, Cochise County sheriff's reports show.

LaMadrid and a passenger began climbing a ladder friends had put against the fence, and at the same time someone atop the fence began throwing rocks at the agent. The agent fired and killed LaMadrid as he climbed the ladder. The rock throwers escaped into Mexico.

Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer said he has made a decision about whether to prosecute the agent in the LaMadrid case, but he is waiting until federal authorities make their call so as not to influence their decision.

who's in charge?

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security inspector general, the Border Patrol's critical incident team and the Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs branch all may respond to any shooting by a Border Patrol agent.

The U.S. Attorney's Office oversees the investigation, and local agencies - such as a sheriff's department - may also investigate whether state laws were broken. In Elena Rodriguez's case, the local agency was Sonoran state police, who responded on their side of the border.

Who's in charge, and what happens from there? That's a tougher question. Even Jim Calle, a Tucson attorney whose job is to defend Border Patrol agents involved in shootings or accused of misconduct, can't pinpoint the process.

"I've been doing this for more than a decade, and it's still confusing to me," Calle said. "That's how the federal government operates. They're slow. It's opaque, and they (the investigations) are always difficult."

"There are times when the public never learns about the shooting, never mind the process," he added. "The one thing I am sure of is that every time an agent pulls a trigger, their conduct is critically reviewed, and it is really, really scrubbed hard for all the details to see if they've done anything wrong."

The families of those killed and others find it hard to believe the cases are well-investigated because they can't see it. One of the families stuck in the process is that of Ramses Barron Torres, killed on the Mexican side of the border fence in Nogales, Sonora, by a Border Patrol agent on Jan. 5, 2011.

An FBI spokesman said at the time that Border Patrol agents were trying to arrest drug smugglers when people started throwing rocks at them. Sonoran police said Barron Torres was climbing on the south side of the border fence when shot. It's unclear whether he was a rock thrower.
Now, 23 months later, he FBI says the investigation is ongoing.

Another case has been open even longer: Jorge Solis-Palma was shot on Jan. 4, 2010, after, agents said, he threw rocks at them. The Cochise County Attorney's Office cleared the agent two months later, but the FBI still considers it "an ongoing matter" almost three years later.

In the days after Barron Torres was shot, "there were reporters from here, reporters from over there," his mother, Zelma, said in Spanish. "After a few days, they disappeared. Up till now, I don't know anything."

names are secret

When a Tucson police officer or a Pima County sheriff's deputy shoots and kills somebody, the process is mostly transparent and typically quick.

Both agencies make it a rule to inform the public of the incident quickly and include the officer's name. The Border Patrol keeps the names of agents involved in shootings secret - to the point that LaMadrid's family got a court order to force the federal government to reveal the name of the agent who shot him so they could serve him with legal papers.

On the local level, two investigations of shootings occur.

In one, the local homicide department looks into whether the officer broke the law. Investigators pass their findings to the county attorney's office for a ruling on whether charges should be filed.
In the other investigation, internal affairs decides whether the officer followed department rules and regulations.

Those cases are typically wrapped up in two to six months, attorney Calle said.

The different ways the two levels of government respond is typical, said Klinger, the University of Missouri professor.

"The further away from the populace the seat of power is, the less accountability there is," he said. "For whatever reason, people haven't been making a big stink about federal use of deadly force."
In Border Patrol shooting cases, the investigation may be in an "ongoing" status long after FBI special agents have completed their work, said James Turgal, special agent in charge of the agency's Phoenix division. That may be because prosecutors from the county to the U.S. Attorney's Office to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., are considering their options.

"Just because the FBI walks down to the U.S. Attorney's Office and presents a case, it doesn't mean we get an answer the next day," he said.

doubtful witnesses

FBI agents enter Border Patrol shooting cases impartially, Turgal said. But the way some cases proceeded left witnesses with doubt.

On June 7, 2010, Border Patrol agents in San Diego killed Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas as they were expelling him from the country into Tijuana. In a press release, San Diego police said agents had uncuffed Hernandez-Rojas and he became violent, causing an agent to use a taser to subdue him.
But witnesses say, and video recordings of the incident show, Hernandez-Rojas's hands were restrained behind his back and he was lying on the ground, screaming for help, as about a dozen agents stood over him, when he was tased and died. The PBS program "Need to Know" revealed the videotapes and some witness accounts in two shows this year.

On June 7, 2010, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed 15-year-old Sergio Hernández-Guereca in a concrete canal that separates Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, from El Paso. In a news release, the FBI said the agent fired when a group "surrounded the agent and continued to throw rocks at him."

Witness accounts and videos show that the agent was not surrounded and that apparently no more than one person threw a rock at him. Nevertheless, the FBI labeled the incident as an "assault on a federal officer."

In some cases, the aftermath of the shootings does not inspire witnesses' confidence in investigators. In both the San Diego and El Paso cases, witnesses who were crossing border bridges when the shootings occurred said they were hustled away and not questioned.

One American woman who watched the agent shoot Hernández-Guereca said in a deposition that she refused to leave the bridge despite a security guard shouting at her, and she spoke to investigators only after she insisted on calling 911 and later called the FBI.

"No one approached me and said, 'Listen, can you tell us what happened?'" Bobbie James McDow said in a sworn deposition taken as part of a civil lawsuit. "It was basically, 'Get off the bridge, get off the bridge, get out of here.' "

More recently, a Nogales, Ariz., resident whose 911 call started chain of events that led to the killing of Jose Antonio Elena Rodríguez across the border, said no one has interviewed him.

Marco Gonzalez, a radio announcer who lives along the border, called 911 the night of Oct. 10 to tell police that people had jumped the border fence and were moving through his yard and a neighboring street. Soon after, he saw border agents drive by, then heard gunshots.

Neither Nogales police nor Border Patrol agents nor the FBI contacted him.

Sanctions unlikely

An agent who shoots somebody is unlikely to face prosecution or even internal discipline.
The Border Patrol declined to say whether the agents in any of the six recent Southern Arizona shooting cases were reprimanded. "Administrative and disciplinary actions of our employees are not made public," agency spokesman Brooks said in an email.

Calle, the Border Patrol union's lawyer, said in shootings it's "exceedingly rare that an agent faces disciplinary consequences for their conduct."

That's partly because most shootings are legally justified, agents and attorneys said. They argue there are more shootings now largely because more border jumpers resist arrest.

Also, they say, agents enjoy an assumption that they're in the right, and they face a higher threshold for prosecution than the average citizen.

"Law enforcement officers are given the benefit of the doubt, not only by juries and American citizens, but inside DAs' and U.S. attorneys' offices," said Johnny Sutton, who was U.S. attorney for the western district of Texas from 2001 to 2009. "You're always loath to prosecute a cop because you understand they're putting their lives on the line every day."

As U.S. attorney, Sutton ruled many shootings by agents justified and denied prosecution, he said, but his office also put two Border Patrol agents in prison. In 2005, agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean shot an unarmed drug trafficker who was running away. Their conviction and sentencing prompted a nationwide outcry led by television personalities. President Bush commuted their sentences on his last day in office.

Beyond the benefit of the doubt officers receive, their jobs make them less likely to be charged in the first place. Prosecutors must consider the likelihood of winning a conviction when taking on a case, and it's simply harder to win a case against a cop.

Cochise County Attorney Rheinheimer brought a second-degree murder case against Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Corbett in 2008, arguing Corbett's January 2007 killing of an illegal immigrant was unjustified and a crime. There were two trials, two hung juries and finally Rheinheimer dropped the case.

The Border Patrol agents union lambasted Rheinheimer for prosecuting, saying "he let undue influence from the Mexican government and the radical special-interest groups taint his decision-making ability."

Longtime Tucson civil-rights activist Isabel Garcia, an attorney, laid the blame for the loss on the public's misconception of the border area as a war zone.

"Even when we get what we should get - full prosecution - it's really hard to break that impunity," she said. "The public is very ignorant. They believe all the ugly stuff, so of course they give the agents full immunity."

If there's a next time, Rheinheimer said, he would factor in his failure to convict Corbett when deciding whether it's worth bringing charges against another agent.

That reality, he said, "is balanced against doing whatever is the right thing to do."

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/border-patrol-faces-little-accountability/article_7899cf6d-3f17-53bd-80a8-ad214b384221.html

Border agent wounds man near Gila Bend: 2nd such incident this week, at least 9th since Jan. '10

A U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and injured a man Tuesday evening south of Gila Bend.

It was the latest in a series of shootings by border agents in Arizona - the second this week, the fourth since Oct. 2 and at least the ninth since January 2010.

In this case, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported, Yuma Sector agents responded to possible bandit activity near a checkpoint on Arizona 85.

The agents came across two armed men about 14 miles southwest of Gila Bend, and at least one of the agents fired, hitting one of the armed men, the agency said in a news release.

That man was flown to a Phoenix hospital and is in stable condition; the other man, a Mexican national illegally in the country, was arrested. Agents found a handgun and an assault rifle at the scene, the news release said.

The FBI is investigating.

On Sunday at midday, an agent working in the southern Baboquivari Mountains on the Tohono O'odham Nation shot and killed a man whom the agency described as getting into an altercation with the agent.

Neither Mexican consular officials nor the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office knew the identities of either man shot in this week's incidents.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/border-agent-wounds-man-near-gila-bend/article_1da78974-695c-56ea-b1f3-c06f56cd44e3.html

Private Prisons in a Wider Context: Video

From Chaparral Respects No Borders:

It has been encouraging to see the awareness about the role of private prison companies in influencing criminalization of people grow and grow in the last year.  SB 1070 and the relationship between various legislators like Russell Pearce and private prison companies like CCA and Geo Group within the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and between governor Jan Brewer and CCA, has been exposed recently.  People had already started to address the connection between Wells Fargo and private prison-run detention centers that hold thousands of migrants in other parts of the country and a tiny bit here in AZ.  Now there are country-wide campaigns popping off against private prisons companies and against ALEC.

However, as horrible as the conditions in private prisons are (and they do tend to be several times worse than state-run facilities), and as obvious as it is that SB 1070 passed with great influence on the part of those who stand to make millions off of putting people in cages, I would hate to see the focus be solely on this most recent phenomenon.  An anti-private prison campaign can easily fall into the same traps as the "go after the real criminals" message, as though there's nothing wrong with the "criminal" "justice" system.  As though the criminalization of people who cross a man-made line is not similar to the criminalization of so many of the people in prisons today and historically.  We should also consider the limitations of previous nation-wide anti-private prison campaigns like the one that targeted Sodexho in the early 2000's. A focus only on the privatization of prisons can only divert energy from addressing the prison system in general; the various reasons people end up in jail or prison, and the ways in which the system will never and is not meant to address the real ills of our society.

I put together the following video to provide a complex yet still simplistic (limited by time and resources) history of criminalization of people for the benefit of the few.  Please share it with anyone you think would be interested.  This video is a follow up from several of my blog entries including No Borders or Prison Walls and What came first: the Racism or the Profit Motive? On Private Prisons' push for SB1070



Please also view the 2nd part.  It all ties together, and there's some good commentary towards the end.

LGBT immigrants abused while in U.S. custody

The Heartland Alliance National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) on Wednesday filed 13 complaints alleging human rights abuses against LGBT immigrants recently and currently held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers.

According to the NIJC, the individuals who filed complaints all came to the United States to escape persecution in their native countries, and have since faced continued abuse in the immigration system.

The NIJC is asking the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the treatment of LGBT people in DHS custody, craft policies to address violations and oversee implementation.

According to the NIJC’s complaint (PDF), some of the people held are legal residents who were previously convicted of a crime -– in some cases, just a misdemeanor; others are felons who were transferred to ICE custody after longer prison sentences; and others were undocumented aliens or people who have overstayed their visas.

All are, or were, held based on civil and not criminal offenses, reports the NIJC.

The alleged abuses against LGBT individuals include denial of medical care, discrimination and sexual assault.

In one case, according to the NIJC complaint, Steve, a gay Peruvian asylum seeker, was held in solitary confinement for six weeks “on the sole basis that he is HIV-positive.”

“Officers frequently prohibited Steve from leaving his cell to get his HIV medication,” the report alleges. “Steve was traumatized when he sought medical treatment and an officer refused to remove the shackles from his feet, waist, and hands despite pleas from his doctor.”

The report describes sexual assaults by fellow inmates followed by repeated denials for transfer from the victim as well as a transgender inmate being denied her hormone treatment, despite her use of hormones for ten years prior to detainment.

“The administration should take immediate steps to apply the protections of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which would provide protections and remedies for individuals who are victims of sexual assault, to all immigration detention facilities,” the group said.

Heartland Alliance has established a letter campaign to President Barack Obama and DHS. (You can add your signature to the letter here.)

NIJC, based in Chicago, provides direct legal services to and advocates for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers through policy reform, impact litigation, and public education.

http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2011/04/complaint-alleges-lgbt-immigrants-abused-while-in-u-s-custody/

Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants

By PETER CERVANTES-GAUTSCHI

Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.

These facilities are run by two Wall Street-backed companies that actively promote the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants in the United States -the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group.

The T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas provides a now well-known example of the abuses that take place within private prisons for immigrants. Beginning in May 2006,the Don Hutto prison was used to house children and their parents who were on a path to deportation. Reports began to surface of widespread abusive treatment of immigrant children by staff of Corrections Corporation of America. An ACLU lawsuit filed on the basis of documented cases of abuse finally led to the closing of the Don Hutto facility for housing families in 2008. After the children were excluded, the Don Hutto only held women detainees. But the abuses continued. Evidence has surfaced that a number of women were sexually abused over the past two years in Don Hutto by CCA staff. Sexual abuse, including rape, has been documented in several detention centers.

The other large private prison corporation contracted by the federal government to run immigrant prisons is the GEO Group. The GEO detention facilities have also racked up many reports and complaints of abusive treatment of immigrant detainees and corrupt staff practices that violate the basic human rights of prisoners. Last month we spoke with the sibling of a detainee in a GEO-run facility who was denied basic medical attention for lack of funds to pay. The detainee’s family had to raise funds to get their relative medical attention in the facility from GEO. Other GEO detainees have died from a lack of medical attention.

Another relative of a GEO detainee told us that prisoners who avoid getting on the wrong side of GEO guards could aspire, at most, to a job in the prison that pays 17 cents an hour for doing office work.

GEO recently agreed to pay restitution for its employees’ physical abuse of prisoners who were strip searched in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, and New Mexico. In another case, GEO was ordered to pay $40 million in the wrongful death of a prisoner in its custody in Raymondville, Texas. GEO has also been sued by seven children who were sexually assaulted by a guard while being held in a GEO facility.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the GEO Group, a global corporation based in Boca Raton, Florida are the nation’s two largest prison companies. They run highly integrated operations to design, build, finance and operate prisons. GEO rakes in $1.17 billion in annual revenue, and CCA tops that at $1.69 billion. Together these companies are principal moving forces in the behind-the-scenes organization of the current wave of anti-immigrant legislative efforts, which, if successful, would dramatically increase the number of immigrant prisoners in over 20 states.

Following the Money

GEO CEO, George Zoley, was a Bush “Pioneer” who bundled more than $100,000 in contributions for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in 2000 and 2004. In October 2003, GEO was successful in securing the contract to run the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

GEO hired the services of lobbyists who had held influential positions in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Prisons, Office of the Attorney General, and the office of then-Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, to lobby their former employers and Congress. Throughout 2005 and leading up to the largest immigration raid in U.S. history in December 2006, GEO and CCA spent a combined total of over $6 million on lobbying efforts.

On May 1, 2006, while millions of people marched in favor of immigrant rights in 102 cities across the country, GEO and CCA were lobbying the federal government for more business. The marchers, despite their historic turnout and broad citizen base, could not block the growing wave of government support of GEO’s and CCA’s business plans.

The December 2006 raid, in which over a thousand men and women employed at Swift meat-packing plants in several states were detained, marked a change in the federal government’s enforcement of the 1995 immigration law. For the first time, many of those picked up were charged with crimes such as falsifying identity documents or identity theft that carry long prison sentences, rather than misuse of a social security number, a misdemeanor.

This single change in enforcement of existing law created a potential “market” of over 10 million new felons almost overnight, multiplying the lucrative incarceration market for the private prison industry and sending a shock wave through immigrant-related communities across the country. At the time of the Swift raid, USA Today quoted the Reverend Clarence Sandoval of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Logan, Utah, as saying, “They are taking mothers and fathers and we’re really concerned about the children. I’m getting calls from mothers saying they don’t know where their husband was taken.”

Through this change in how federal law is enforced, CCA and GEO suddenly had a huge pool of captive clients, and began to rake in millions of dollars in public funds to house, transport, feed and control immigrants.

Predictably, costs to taxpayers skyrocketed. From 2006 to the present, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) budget for the identification, custody, transportation, detention and removal of immigrants has increased 51%. The U.S. Marshall budget for the custody and transportation of immigrants over the same period has increased 15%, and the Bureau of Prisons budget for detention of immigrants over the same period has gone up 9%. The billions of dollars in increased expenditures have provided the primary source for the billions in increased revenue for CCA and GEO.

In addition, currently 625 state, county and municipality law enforcement agencies are providing identification, custody, transportation and detention of immigrants through agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

According to a federal Government Accounting Office study conducted last year the cost of this program to local taxpayers is unknown because 60% of state and local governments do not keep data on their personnel, equipment, supplies and other costs related to these agreements, and therefore are not reimbursed for those costs. Whatever the exact cost, local taxpayers will feel the pinch as this program is expected to expand to all 3,100 state, county and municipal detention jurisdictions in the nation by the end of 2011. Consequently CCA and GEO can expect to increase their revenues as states and counties increasingly subcontract incarceration responsibilities to these companies.

Last year Seeking Alpha, a website of actionable stock market opinion and analysis popular on Wall Street, reported that GEO’s income from prison health care services ending in March of 2009 topped $1.0 billion, a 5.8% profit. Seeking Alpha also stated that CCA’s profit for the same period in 19 states was over $1.6 billion, with a profit margin of 9.4%. In an article entitled “Where Delinquencies Make for Good Business” the same publication noted, “Crime, unfortunately, is a growth industry and GEO Group has proven to be a successful player in the outsourcing trend for governments at many levels.” Pushing criminalization of immigrants to cast a wider net in society has been a key part of that “success.”

Soon after the Bush Administration implemented the change in law enforcement affecting immigrants, Wall Street advisors publically recommended buying stock in private prison companies like CCA and GEO. At the time, Vice President Dick Cheney was heavily invested in Vanguard, one of a handful of major shareholders in GEO.

The lobbying paid off for both companies, in huge revenue increases from government contracts to incarcerate immigrants. From 2005 through 2009, for every dollar that GEO spent lobbying the government, the company received a $662 return in taxpayer-funded contracts, for a total of $996.7 million. CCA received a $34 return in taxpayer-funded contracts for every dollar spent on lobbying the federal government, for a total of $330.4 million. In addition, both companies increased revenues over the same period from detention facility contracts with a number of states.

In 2007, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) conducted 30,407 immigration raids in workplaces, neighborhoods, and public gathering sites such as bus stops and commuter train platforms. The number of raids conducted that year was double the 2006 total. The number of immigrants placed behind bars, for what amounts to the crime of having been born in the wrong place, increased from 256,842 in 2006 to 311,169 in 2007.

As a result of fear induced by the raids and other factors, pro-immigrant May Day marches in 2007 were much smaller than those of the previous year. In mid-2007, while many activists and organizers were focused on legislative reform, public protests, eliminating the raids, and trying to help families and friends of those who had been taken away by ICE and other enforcement agencies, GEO and CCA shareholders reaped a huge profit. Both companies issued 2-for-1 stock splits that roughly doubled the value of their shareholders’ stake.

Although stockholders profited handsomely as revenues from prison contracts rose for both companies, the increase wasn’t large enough to satisfy some of their respective major shareholders. J.P. Morgan Chase, a major owner of GEO, dumped most of its stock and relinquished its leadership position in the company.

One problem for major investors seeking huge gains from the for-profit prison business was that revenue rates couldn’t keep rising because federal agencies didn’t have enough personnel to arrest and process more immigrants than the expanded number they were now handling. It became apparent that the only way to significantly raise revenue through increasing the numbers of people picked up, detained and incarcerated was to hire more law enforcement personnel.

The private prison industry now needed a new source of low-cost licensed law enforcement personnel. CCA and GEO then turned to state governments as the focus of business expansion. Both companies stepped up efforts to acquire contracts with state and local governments that were entering into lucrative agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants in state and local detention and correctional facilities.

The result of this shift in business focus is exemplified by CCA’s role in Arizona’s SB 1070 and both CCA’s and GEO’s roles in other legislative efforts aimed at dramatically increased numbers arrests of undocumented immigrants in over 20 states. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer, who received substantial campaign financing from top CCA executives in Tennessee and employs two former CCA lobbyists Chuck Coughlin and Paul Sensman, as top aides, signed SB 1070 into law on April 23.

On Friday, July 30, 2010 the Republican Governors Association, which so far this year has received over $160,000 in contributions from CCA and GEO, and their respective lobbyists, sent out a nationwide solicitation written by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer requesting contributions to fund an appeal of the partial injunction issued by a judge against SB 1070.

In addition to funds raised by the partisan appeal, Brewer’s legal effort has been bolstered by supporting briefs filed with the appeals court by three states– Florida, Texas and Virginia–that have contracts with GEO or with both GEO and CCA. The two prison companies are currently ramping up their political involvement in these states and in several others that have anti-immigrant bills moving through their respective legislatures. In all, twenty states are considering SB 1070-inspired bills, which have been endorsed by their respective Republican gubernatorial candidates, financed in large part by the Republican Governor’s Association.

Last November, CCA’s top management in Tennessee contributed the largest block of out-of-state campaign contributions received by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.[1] CCA, which already has several detention facilities in Arizona and hopes of expanding its immigrant prison business in that state, is expected to gain a huge increase in revenues with the implementation of SB 1070. Currently, Latinos driving out of the city of Tucson in any direction are being stopped at checkpoints, where they are asked to show their papers.

GEO and CCA are now heavily involved in the governor and state legislative races in states where they plan to expand their respective shares of the prison and incarceration market. GEO, for example, backed first-term Republican Governor, Bob McDonnell, in Virginia last year, and has contributed heavily to the Republican Governor’s Association and to the Florida Republican Party. In addition to Jan Brewer in Arizona, CCA is contributing to the campaigns of both, Republican Meg Whitman, and Democrat Jerry Brown, for governor in California. CCA is also giving money to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, even though Jindal isn’t currently facing an election, and to the Republican Governors Association, which has contributed over $1.5 million to state races this year.[2]

Since the change of administration in Washington D.C., GEO has expanded its presence there by adding the services of lobbyists who formerly served in high positions in the Obama presidential campaign, the Clinton White House, and the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Currently, GEO retains the services of three Washington D.C. lobbyists who also work for Wells Fargo, GEO’s top shareholder. One of GEO’s Washington D.C. lobbyists, Barbara Comstock, is also a member of the Virginia state legislature. CCA relies on its officers to do its lobbying in Washington DC,[3] where some board members, such as former Arizona U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini, are well-connected.

CCA’s and GEO’s share of the taxpayer-funded immigrant incarceration business has grown substantially since 2006. Today, for example, in California, anyone picked up by ICE in Los Angeles is sent to a CCA facility in San Diego, while those picked up by ICE in Seattle or Portland, OR, are sent to a GEO facility in Tacoma, Washington, because detention facilities owned and operated by the federal government are at 137% capacity, with no room to house more prisoners.

Wall Street’s Role

CCA and GEO are owned by major Wall Street institutions, which profit from the immigrant incarceration business as major shareholders.

The most influential investor in CCA is a hedge fund, Pershing Square, which is run by Wall Street investment guru activist investor, Bill Ackman. Ackman also plays a powerful role in Target Corporation and Kraft Foods. Wells Fargo is the most powerful investor in GEO.

Other major investors with the power to influence management in one or the other of the two companies are Vanguard, Lazard, Scopia, Wellington Management, FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock and Bank of America. Each of these major owners is sensitive to public opinion in one way or another. These major investors do not need to rely on either CCA or GEO to make money, since most of their money is invested in enterprises unrelated to private prisons.

By almost any measure, the increased number of deportations of immigrants has not had the desired effects on anyone other than the private prison industry. Unemployment among native-born citizens in the U.S. has skyrocketed as the number of immigrants being deported has risen to over 400,000 a year.

The United States now has more people in prison than any other country on earth. At over 2 million, the U.S. has a half million more people behind bars than China, which has the second highest number of prisoners.

One would like to think that bringing this information to Congress’s attention would be enough to compel them to abandon policies that criminalize immigrants. However, that is not likely to happen soon.

This probable reluctance on the part of Congress to act isn’t merely because of the substantial campaign contributions that Senators and members of Congress receive from the private prison industry. Most members of Congress have personal investments in one or more of CCA’s or GEO’s major shareholders.

While it is true that many people are invested in CCA or GEO through their pensions without knowing it, reports on the personal finances of some key members of Congress suggest some of them have more than a casual interest in the fortunes of CCA or GEO.

One example of a Washington DC powerhouse with a substantial financial interest in CCA is Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, one of a small group of investors in Pershing Square, a hedge fund that holds the most stock in CCA of any of the company’s shareholders. Senator Enzi, a senior Republican who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, was awarded a 100% approval rating by U.S. Border Control (USBC), which describes itself as “a non-profit, tax-exempt, citizen’s lobby. USBC is dedicated to ending illegal immigration by securing our nation’s borders and reforming our immigration policies.”

As Congress is currently tasked with finding ways to reduce the burgeoning deficit and alleviate the suffering caused by the economic crisis, shifting priorities from programs that benefit prison companies to much-needed programs that benefit taxpayers only makes sense. Compelling Congress to abandon immigrant criminalization policies is probably going to require, among other things, that citizens convince some combination of our pension funds, Wells Fargo, and a key hedge fund or two, to pull out of the private prison industry and to go elsewhere to make money.

We should be able accomplish this. IBM and Ford, when challenged, found themselves unable to justify their investments in apartheid in South Africa. As a result of a swelling movement of students, faith-based organizations, unions and shareholders, these companies divested in 1986, contributing to the fall of the racist apartheid system and a transition to democracy.

Similarly, Wells Fargo, Pershing Square, and other financial giants shall be hard-pressed to justify investments in the massive suffering caused by the criminalization of immigrants, as a movement comes together to expose the harm done to the public good by their current investments in the immigrant prison industry.

Who knows? Some of these financial institutions might even see the wisdom in investing in companies that produce family-wage jobs.

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi is the Director of Enlace, a Portland, OR based organization focused on strategic organizing, campaigns, and training in organizational development around workers’ struggles, and the impacts of multinational corporations in the lives of people in all sectors of society. Peter has been a labor activist since 1965, starting as a young farm worker in Southern California. He is a frequent contributor to the Americas Program www.cipamericas.org.

Sources.

[1] Arizona campaign contribution reports compiled by the National Institute On Money in State Politics show that CCA’s CEO Damon Hininger, CFO Todd Mullenger, CDO Anthony Grande, and then General Counsel, Gus Puryear, contributed to Jan Brewer’s campaign.

[2] National Institute on Money in State Politics.

[3] Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets.org

http://www.counterpunch.org/gautschi10152010.html

Arizona's New Immigration Law: Cops vs. CopWatchers

Arizona's SB1070 is now law but, gutted of the provisions that made it a national controversy, it is a remarkably toothless instrument for policing, despite the huff and guff of anti-illegal-immigration hardliners like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix), who did not postpone scheduled sweeps through Latino communities. Indeed, for all the hype of Arpaio's "Crime Suppression/Illegal Immigration Operation" on Thursday, the day the law went into effect, he and his deputies arrested only three undocumented people. By contrast, on Wednesday nearly 90 illegal immigrants were arrested in a two-part sweep in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

What vaporized from Arizona's new immigration law were stipulations that law enforcement could require proof of immigration status from people they have stopped for questioning. The original version would have made it a state crime not to carry documentation; and it would have let police arrest undocumented immigrants if they were found seeking employment in a public space. If Arpaio were armed with all of that, the likelihood is that he would have detained a large number of people. In his 16 prior operations, nearly 1,000 suspected violators were arrested, 60% of whom were undocumented immigrants. This time, out of about 40 people the Sheriff's office apprehended Thursday, only a handful — just 7% — were illegal immigrants.

But there may have been other reasons the numbers were low, apart from the temporary injunction blocking the most contentious parts of the law. Some officers said the desert monsoon weather dampened the operation. Another factor may well have been Lydia Guzman, a prominent Hispanic activist, who, along with a group called CopWatch, designed a detailed messaging system to warn the Phoenix Valley of immigration sweeps. Guzman sent an initial text blast to 100 rapid response teams of business owners, Spanish radio stations, pastors and teachers, each of whom messaged their respective networks. At the same time, Guzman contacted lawyers, social workers and elected officials to be at the ready to help. "It spiderwebs out," she says. "Before you know it my text tree spreads out to thousands of people."

Sheriff Arpaio has called her out for undermining his work. "The Sheriff has even accused me of putting coyotes [the popular name for operators of people smuggling rings] on text tree," she told TIME. "But number one, they don't live here and, number two, a lot of smugglers are the ones we want put away. They are the ones who hurt our people."

In addition to Guzman's tweets, CopWatch visibly tails police operations. On Thursday, in one small West Phoenix mobile command center, members of CopWatch monitored police communications. "They just said '294 King' — that means immigration. Let's go," cried one member listening to the police scanners. And with that CopWatch activists grabbed cameras, lawyer contacts and car keys to follow Arpaio's sweep.

Sheriff Arpaio has been tweeting as well. A few messages sent to his followers and the press from Thursday: "Just got a report that protesters are now trying to block my downtown jail sallyport and are chaining themselves to the jail"; "Just finished up with protesters at the jail, we will now resume our operation"; then immediately after, "I'm heading over to 4th Ave Jail to see what's going on w/ protesters around the jail."

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office arranged for nearly 45 media crews to trail along with the patrols. Sometimes, it seemed that Arpaio's media strategy got in the way of his own operation: his deputies had to delay the crime sweep to enable Arpaio to give a press conference at the jail where protesters chained themselves across the main booking entrance. "He can't stay away from the camera," says CopWatch activist Dennis Gilman. "We successfully disrupted his sweep, because all his deputies were down there dealing with the protesters."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2007858,00.html

Nogales: Laborers in limbo as SB 1070 nears

As Nogales’ Friday morning bustle begins amid the sound of chirping birds and the rumble of a nearby garbage truck, a tan-colored pickup pulls up slowly to the strip of Grand Avenue in front of the Pimeria Alta Museum.

The driver, a smiling, wrinkled man honks twice as men dressed in denim, work boots and baseball caps hold up fingers in a gesture to ask how many workers he needs.

The truck, its bed loaded to the brim with wood, pulls in to the parking lot behind the museum and two men jump in.

Meanwhile, just up the street, a group of crisply dressed women sit anxiously on benches, clutching their purses. One stands up and waves at a blonde-haired woman, who greets her in broken Spanish before the two continue down the sidewalk.

One-by-one, the other women follow suit, climbing into cars or walking away with a newfound employer.

The day has begun for Nogales’ day laborers – men who do yard and construction work, and women who clean houses or nanny children. Some are out-of-work Americans, while others are unemployed Mexicans who cross legally into the U.S. as tourists, but try instead to find an informal day’s work.

The architects of SB 1070, Arizona’s tough new immigration law, hope that life for these folks gets a lot tougher on July 29 when the measure comes into effect. Under the law, people who hire day laborers can be charged with a class 1 misdemeanor.

No distinction

Francisco Castillo, who patrols the lot behind the museum for neighboring Bank of America, said it’s typical to see men sitting under the billboard in the lot each weekday morning.

“It’s become a custom,” Castillo said. “The museum is somewhat of a reunion point for people without work.”

And in Santa Cruz County, there are a lot of people without work. According to May figures from the Arizona Department of Commerce, the county jobless rate remains around 18 percent – which hit a decade high in March.

Jesus Gutierrez, a Rio Rico resident who said he was laid off from jobs at Wal-Mart, Zulas Papachoris’ Restaurant, and Jack-In-The-Box because of the recession, now seeks work as a day laborer.

“I hope to find yard work, or whatever I can get,” Gutierrez said, as he sat in the shade of a ramada across the train tracks from the museum.

He said he hasn’t found work in the past few weeks and he said he thinks enforcement of SB 1070 will help him, since people tend to hire day laborers from Mexico who work for less.

However, the law does not distinguish between a person who hires Gutierrez, who lives legally in the U.S., and someone who hires Martin, Hector or Leonel – three day laborers who didn’t want to reveal their last names because they live in Mexico and lack U.S. work visas.

As a blue sedan with a rolled-down window slowed near the museum, Martin held up three fingers and shouted, “How many do you need? We do yard work and tiling.”

But the car sped off and Martin turned to Hector and Leonel and said, “Well, looks like we’re not going to be working today.”

Martin, who crosses in from Nogales, Sonora five days a week, said he finds work about two days a week – usually in Rio Rico.

He said there is less work now than before and he said he thinks it’s because people have less money to pay workers. Or perhaps they’re fearful to hire day laborers because of the new law, he said.

Enforcement

Castillo said he thinks many of the day laborers are undocumented, and he expects to see big declines in their numbers come July 29.

Lt. Octavio Gradillas of the Nogales Police Department disagrees.

“When they’re so visibly out in public like that, I think they’re legal,” Gradillas said. “Especially with so many border agents downtown I don’t think they’d risk being caught.”

Yet even with Border Patrol agents whizzing by on a bike every few minutes, or a Border Patrol helicopter hovering above the museum, Martin, Hector and Leonel say law enforcement officials rarely – if ever – approach them.

Gradillas said it’s only a police matter if NPD receives a complaint, like the time museum staff complained that the congregated laborers were blocking pedestrian access.

When asked about the day laborers near the museum, Mario Escalante, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, said he had heard of the group, but that to his knowledge, the agency has not received any requests to verify the workers’ legality.

Gradillas said since a lot is still up in the air regarding the role of the police in enforcing SB1070, he has no idea how – or if – the law will affect NPD’s responsibility for cracking down on day laborers.

Martin, the undocumented laborer, said he’d be under the billboard on July 29 to see how it all shakes out.

“I’m still going to come,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2010/06/25/news/doc4c24caad7d6db972255565.txt

"To the immigrants" by Alfredo M. Bonanno

By Alfredo M. Bonanno
(More writings by Bonanno)

Translated from Guerra Sociale

We asked for labour power, men came.
Max Frisch

No one emigrates from their country for pleasure – this is a simple truth that many want to hide. If someone leaves their land and loved ones peacefully, we don’t define them as migrants, but simply as travellers or tourists. Migration is a coercive form of moving, a roaming in search of better living conditions.

At the moment there are 150 million ‘foreigners’ around the world due to wars, ecological disasters, famine, or simply the management of industrial production (the destruction of countryside and forests, mass lay-offs, and so on). All these aspects form a mosaic of oppression and misery in which the effects of exploitation become more or less direct causes of suffering and uprooting in a never ending spiral that makes any distinction between “displaced”, “migrants”, asylum seekers, refugees, survivors, hypocritical. Just think how social so called ecological emergencies (lack of water, growing desertification, field sterility) are: the explosion of an oil refinery, together with the destruction of every local autonomy on which it rested, can sometimes change the fate of an entire population.

Contrary to what racist propaganda would have us believe, only 17% of immigration concerns the rich North, it involves all continents (the African and Asian ones in particular); that means that for every poor country there is an even poorer one which immigrants are running away from. The total mobilization imposed by economy and States is a planetary symptom, an undeclared civil war that crosses every national border: millions of exploited people roam through the hell of the commercial heaven, jolted from border to border, forced into refugee camps, surrounded by police and army, handled by so-called charity organisations – partners in tragedies whose causes they don’t denounce for the mere purpose of exploiting the consequences – piled up in “waiting zones” in airports or stadiums (macabre circenses for those who don’t even have bread), locked up in Lagers called “detention centres” and, finally, packaged and expelled in the most total indifference. For many reasons we could say that the face of these unwelcome people is the face of our time – and that’s also why we’re so afraid of them. Immigrants scare us because in their misery we can see the reflection of our own, because in their wanderings we recognise our daily condition: the condition of persons who feel more and more like strangers both to this world and to themselves.

Uprooting is the most widespread condition in our present society – we might call it its centre – not a threat coming from a terrifying and mysterious elsewhere. Only by directing our gaze at our daily lives can we understand what gets all of us into the condition of immigrants. First though we must define a fundamental concept: that of clandestinity.


The creation of the clandestine, the creation of the enemy
[…] what are you? […]
You are not of this castle, you are not of this village, you are nothing.
But you are something too, unfortunately, you are a foreigner, someone that is always
inopportune and in the way, one that brings a lot of troubles, […]
whose intentions no one knows.
F. Kafka

An alien is simply someone who doesn’t have regular papers. And this is certainly not due to the pure pleasure of risk or illegality, but rather because in the majority of cases, in order to own such papers he or she would have to give certain guarantees the possession of which wouldn’t have made them aliens in the first place, but simply tourists or foreign students. If the same standards were forced on everybody, millions would have been thrown overboard. Which unemploy-ed Italian, for instance, could give the guarantee of a legal wage? What about all the precarious people here who work for temporary job agencies, whose contracts are not even worth a visa for immigrants? And by the way, are there as many Italians living in a 60 squares metres flat with no more than two other people? If we read all these decrees (from both the left and the right wing) about immigration, it will be clear that clandestinization is a precise project of States. Why?

An illegal immigrant is easier to blackmail, to make accept, under the threat of expulsion, even more hateful conditions of work and existence (precariousness, endless wandering, makeshift accommo-dation, and so on). With the threat of the police, bosses obtain tame wage slaves, or rather real forced labour workers. Even the most reactionary and xenophobic right wing parties are perfectly aware that hermetically closed borders are not only technically impossible, but are not even profitable. According to the United Nations, in order to keep the present “balance between active and inactive population”, from here to 2025, Italy should “take” inside its borders a quantity of immigrants five times the present yearly fixed amount. Confindustria, in fact, continuously suggest doubling the quantity fixed so far.

The granting or rejection of year-long or season-long permits contributes to creating a specific social hierarchy among the poor. The same distinction between immediate forced repatriation and expulsion (or the obligation, for an irregular immigrant, who shows up at the borders to be sent back home) allows them to choose who to make clandestine or to expel right away – a choice based on ethnic principles, economical-political agreement with the governments of the countries the immigrant comes from and the needs of the labour market. In fact, the authorities are perfectly aware that no one will ever spontaneously show up at the border to be expelled; surely not people who have spent all that they owned – sometimes even more – to pay for their trip here. Businessmen define the features of the goods they buy (immigrants are goods, like everything else after all), the State records data, police carry out orders.

The warnings of politicians and mass media, anti-immigration claims build up imaginary enemies to drive the exploited from here to lay on an easy scapegoat the growing social tension and reassure them, letting them admire the show of poor and even more precarious and blackmailed people than themselves, and let them feel part of a ghost called Nation. Making of “irregularity” – that same irregularity that they create – synonymous with crime and danger, States justify police control and the criminalisation of class conflict that is getting more and more seditious. In this context, for instance, should be seen the manipulation of consensus after September 11, summed up in the despicable slogan “clandestine=terrorist” which combines, if read in both senses, racist paranoia with the demand for repression against the enemy within (rebels, subversives).

They shout out, from the right as well as the left, against the Mafia that organises the journeys for clandestine people (described by the media as an invasion, a scourge, the advance of an army), when it’s by their very laws that they are promoted. They shout out against “organised crime” exploiting so many immigrants (which is true but only partially), when it’s they who supply it with desperate and ready-for-everything resources. In their historical symbiosis, State and Mafia stand united by the same liberal principle: business is business.

Racism, a means for economic and political necessity, finds room to spread in a context of generalised standardisation and isolation, when insecurity creates fears that can be opportunely manipulated. A moral or cultural condemnation of racism is of little use, since it is not an opinion or an argument, but psychological misery, an “emotional plague”. It’s in the present social conditions that the reason of its spreading ought to be sought and also, at the same time, the power to fight it.

The welcome of a lager

To call the detention camps for immigrants waiting for expulsion Lagers– centres introduced in Italy in 1998 by the left wing government by mean of the Turco-Napolitano law – is not rhetorical emphasis, as most of those who use this formula think. It is a strict definition. Nazi Lagers were concentration camps where people thought by the police to be dangerous for State security were locked up, even in the absence of criminally indictable behaviour. This precautionary measure – defined as “protective detention” – consisted in taking all civil and political rights away from certain citizens. Whether they were refugees, Jewish, gypsy, homosexuals or subversives, it was up to the police, after months or years, to decide what to do about them. So Lagers were not jails in which to expiate some crime, nor an extension of criminal law. They were camps where the Rule set its exception; in short terms, a legal suspension of legality. Therefore a Lager is not a consequence of the number of internees or of the number of murders (between 1935 and 1937, before the start of Jewish deportations, in Germany internees numbered 7500), but rather of its political and juridical nature.

Immigrants nowadays end up in the Centres regardless of possible crimes, without any criminal trial whatsoever: their internment, ordered by the police superintendents, are a simple police measure. Just as happened in 1940 under the Vichy government, when prefects could lock up all the individuals considered a “danger for national defence and public security” or (mind this) “foreigners in respect to the national economy”. We can refer to administrative detention in French Algeria, to the South Africa of apartheid or to the present ghettos for Palestinians created by the State of Israel.

It is not a coincidence if, with regard to the infamous conditions of the detention centres, the good democrats don’t appeal to the respect of any law at all, but to the respect of human rights – the last mask in front of women and men to whom nothing remains but belonging to the human species. It’s not possible to integrate them as citizens, so they are falsely integrated as Human Beings. The abstract equality of principles hides real inequalities everywhere.

A new eradication
Immigrants that for the
first time landed on Battery Park soon
realized that what they had been
told about the marvelous America
wasn’t true at all:
maybe land belonged to everybody,
but the first come
had largely served themselves already,
and to them there was nothing left
than to crowd together in tens in windowless
hovels
of the Lower East Side and work fifteen hours
a day. Turkeys didn’t fall roasted
straight in the dishes and the streets of New York
weren’t paved in gold.
Yet, most of the times, they weren’t
paved at all. And then they realised that
it was just to get them to pave these streets that they
were allowed to come. And to dig tunnels
and canals, to build up streets, bridges, big
embankments, railroads, to clear forests, to exploit
mines and caves, to make cars and cigars,/
carabines and clothes, shoes, chewing gum,
corned-beef and soap, and to build
skyscrapers higher
than the ones that they discovered when they first arrived.

-Georges Perec

If we go a few steps back, it will become clear that eradication is a crucial moment in the expansion of the State and capitalistic domination. At its dawn, industrial production drew the exploited away from country and villages to gather them into the city. The ancient skills of farm workers and artisans were thereby substituted with the forced and repetitive activity of the factory – an activity impossible to control, in its means and its finalities, by the new proletarians. So the first children of industrialization lost both their ancient spaces of life and their ancient knowledge, that which had allowed them to autonomously provide for the most part of their means of subsistence. On the other hand, forcing millions of men and women to similar living conditions (same places, same problems, same knowledge), capitalism unified their struggles, got them to find new brothers and sisters to fight against that same unbearable life. The 20th century marked the apex of this productive and State gathering, whose symbols had been the factory-neighbourhood and the Lager, and at the same time the apex of the more radical social struggles for its destruction. In the last twenty years, due to technological innovation, capital has substituted the old factory with new productive cores ever smaller and more widely distributed throughout the territory, also breaking up the fabric of the society within which those fights had grown, thereby creating a new eradication.

There’s more. Technological reorganisation has made trade faster and easier, opening the whole world to the most ferocious competition, overthrowing the economies and the ways of life of entire Countries. So there is, in Africa, in Asia, in South America, the closure of many factories, mass lay offs. All this, within a social context that has been destroyed by colonisation from the deportation of inhabitants from their villages to the shantytowns, from their fields to the assembly lines, produced a crowd of poor people who became useless to their masters, of unwanted children of capitalism. Add to this the fall of self-styled communist Countries and the debt racket initiated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and we will get quite a faithful cartography of migration, of ethnical and religious wars.

What we now call “flexibility” and “precariousness” is the consequence of all this: a further progress in the submission to the machines, fiercer competition, a worsening of material conditions (deals, health, etcetera). We’ve seen the reason why: capitalism has dismantled the community that it created. Anyway it would be partial to see precariousness in an economic sense alone, as the lack of a steady work place and the old pride for professionalism. It is isolation inside standardisation, or a fanatical conformity with lack of common spaces. In the distressing void of meaning and perspectives, mystified, the unfulfilled need of community returns, giving birth to new nationalistic, ethnical or religious counterpositions, a tragic re-proposition of collective identities just where any real communality among individuals has diminished. And it’s exactly within this void that the fundamentalist argument finds its place, false promise of a redeemed community.

Civil war

All this leads to a scenario that is more and more that of an ongoing civil war, with no distinction between “time of peace” and “time of war”. Conflicts are no longer declared – as the military intervention in the Balkans has shown –, but simply administrated to grant the establishment of the World Order. This endless fight goes through the entire society and the very individuals. Common spaces for dialogue and struggles are substituted by adherence to similar commercial models. The poor go to war against each other for a fashionable sweater or a hat, since the possession or not of particular goods creates the illusion of a social or clan-like hierarchy. Individuals feel more and more irrelevant, so ready to sacrifice themselves to the first nationalist blunderbuss or for whatever flag. Abused daily by the State, here they come defending zealously any Padania (desolated and polluted, with factories and mall everywhere – is this the “land of the forefathers”?). Tied to that mirage of property that is left to them, they are scared to face themselves for what they really are: interchangeable gears of the Megamachine, in need of psychotropic drugs to get to the end of the day, always more envious towards everyone who looks even just happier than themselves. To an always colder, more abstract and more calculating rationality, correspond increasingly brutal and untold drives. So, what better than someone different by colour of the skin or religion to throw their grudge upon? As a man from Mozambique said, “people have taken war inside them”. A few external conditions can be enough for all this to explode, just like in Bosnia. And these conditions are being carefully prepared. To capitalist Universalism is opposed, in a tragic game of mirrors, ethnic particularism. Under institutional order, with increasingly anonymous and controlled places, lies concealed the implosion of human relationships. It all looks like the same quicksand from whence in the 30’s totalitarian man arose.

Two possible ways out

Why have we talked so much about immigration and racism, as we are not directly touched by problems of wandering and expulsion? Dictated by some of its peculiarities such as precariousness and the impossibility to decide for our present, this same capitalism is joining our lives more and more: that’s why we feel like brothers, in deed, with the all the exploited who land on the shores of this Country.

In the face of the despoliation of millions of individuals towards a commercial imperialism that is forcing everybody to dream the same lifeless dream, there can be no appeal to dialogue or to democratic integration. Whatever the legalistic anti-racists might say, it’s too late for hypocritical civic education classes. When the fields in which misery is confined – from the shantytowns of Caracas to the suburbs of Paris, from the Palestinian territories to centres and stadia where aliens are locked up–are growing everywhere; when the state of exception – or the juridical suspension of every right – becomes the rule; when millions of human beings are literally left rotting into the reserves of the capitalist heaven; when entire neighbourhoods are getting militarised and armed (Genova doesn’t tell you anything?), to talk of immigration becomes a despicable joke. There are only two ways out from these conditions of desperation and fear, from this planetary civil war: the fraticidal clash (religious and clannish in all its manifestations), or the social tempest of class war.

Racism is the grave of every exploited individual’s fight against the exploiters, it’s the last trick – the dirtiest – played by those who would like to see ourselves killing one another. It can only evaporate in moments of common revolt, when we recognise our real enemies – the exploiters and their servants – and we recognise ourselves as exploited individuals that no longer want to be like that. The social fight that took place in Italy during the 60’s and 70’s – when the young workers immigrated from the South met those from the North in the field of sabotage, wild strikes and absolute disloyalty to the firm – has shown. The disappearance of the revolutionary struggles after the 70’s (from Nicaragua to Italy, from Portugal to Germany, from Poland to Iran) has crumbled the foundation of concrete solidarity among the dispossessed of the World. This solidarity will only be conquered again in the revolt, and not in the powerless words of the new Thirdworlders or the democratic anti-racists.

So, or religious and clannish massacre, or class war. And at the end of this we can only catch a glimpse of a world free from State and money in which there’ll be no need for money to live and no visa required to travel.

A machine that can be broken

A slogan in the 80’s said: “It’s not the noise of boot that should scared us today, but the silence of the slipper”. Now they’re both coming back. With a holy war speech (the police as “army of good” protecting citizens from the “army of evil”, as the Prime Minister said recently), day after day the State has put up curtains at the expense of immigrants. Their homes are devastated, aliens are rounded up in the streets, locked up in Lagers and expelled in total indifference. New detention camps are already under construction in many cities. The State, wants to limit the number of visas according to the exact length of the work contract, blacklist all immigrants, make being clandestine a crime and strengthen expulsion. The democratic mechanism of rights and citizenship, wide as that might be, will always presuppose the existence of excluded people. To criticise and try to prevent expulsions signifies realising a critique of racism and nationalism in act; it means creating a common space for revolt against the capitalist uprooting that affects us all; it means obstructing a hateful as it is important repressive mechanism; it means breaking the silence and indifference of the civilized ones who stand looking on; lastly, it means confronting the very concept of law dictated by the principle “we are all aliens”. Finally, it signifies an attack on one of the pillars of the State and class society: competition between the poor, the increasingly seditious substitution of social war with ethnic or religious wars.

In order to function the expulsion framework requires the collaboration of many public and private structures (from the Red Cross which cooperates in the management of Lagers, to companies which supply services, to airline companies which deport aliens, to the airports that put up waiting zones, to self-styled charity associations which operate in collaboration with the police). All those responsible can easily be seen and attacked. From actions against detention camps (as happened a couple of years ago in Belgium and a few months ago in Australia, when demonstrations ended up with the liberation of some clandestine immigrants) to those against “waiting zones” (as in France, against the Ibis hotels chain that supplies the police with rooms) or obstructing the flights of infamy (in Frankfurt, the sabotage of optic fibre cables some years ago put all the computers of an airport out of order for a couple of days) there are thousands of activities that a movement against expulsion can carry out.

Today like never before it’s in the street that it’s possible to rebuild class solidarity. In the complicity against police raids; in the struggle against military occupation of neighbourhoods; in the restless rejection of every division that the masters of society want to impose on us (nationals and foreigners, legal immigrants and aliens); aware that every outrage suffered by any dispossessed on Earth is an outrage to everyone – only in this way will the exploited people from a thousand countries recognise themselves.