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Illegal immigration is big business in Texas border

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For volunteer activists working with immigrants, those who profit from the migrants’ plight are “sick”.


But illegal migration is big business in the border state of Texas, generating jobs for private prison operators, money lenders and storefront lawyers.


Texas is at the centre of the immigration crisis produced by President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” practice, which has led to the separation of children from their families that attempted to enter the country illegally.


Although Trump ordered an end to the separations, confusion lingers over what this will mean on the ground. In the meantime, money keeps rolling in for those who benefit from the migrant influx.


More than two-thirds of the 304,000 who entered from Mexico and were detained by border patrol agents in the fiscal year 2017 were in Texas, according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).


Texas has the largest number of detention centres for immigrants.


The Houston detention centre, built in 1983, was the first privately run prison in modern US history. Its owners, CoreCivic and the GEO Group are the two largest prison corporations in the country.


CoreCivic operates four detention centres in Texas under contract to ICE. GEO operates three. Each of the two corporations owns or operates more than 120 prisons nationwide.


According to the investigative centre In The Public Interest, privatising the penal system creates an economic incentive to promote mass incarceration even for minor crimes.


The two corporations together “have spent more than $10 million on political candidates and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts since 1989,” according to an ITPI report.


In 2017, GEO and CoreCivic had a combined revenue of about $4 billion.


“It’s an industry that drives the lobby for increased sentences, increases in mandatory minimum sentences, harsher punishment — because every day they have somebody in a bed, you know, they’re making money,” immigration lawyer Jodi Goodwin, who works for the nonprofit Migrant Center for Human Rights, said.


“It’s a sick industry.”


But privately run prisons and shelters are not the only ones profiting from the business of illegal immigration.


“This is an industry — a rising industry,” economist William Glade, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas, said. — AFP


Leila Macor


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