Negative Creep

Surprising immigration news from the New York Times. The US recession is so bad now that it's actually bucking the migration trend we're used to hearing Republican Presidential candidates tell us needs to be combated with electrified fences and "aviation assets" and really big magnets or something like that anyway.

Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey centered in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research shows that interest in heading to the United States for the first time has fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”

I happened upon this article because I read Mark Moseley's column where he references his own hit-or-miss "Superman series" of immigration policy satire. Personally, I've enjoyed the Superman columns although I can understand why some may feel that they were presented by a "dude who needs to learn to write for the internet".

Last Wednesday night Stephen Colbert, another satirist of some note, addressed the labor shortage caused by Alabama's new tough immigration law and its effect on this year's tomato crop. (Tomatoes, I should remind you, are a key ingredient in Beefy Mac.)

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What's important to note here is Colbert's "modest proposal" about replacing poorly treated and underpaid migrant workers with prisoners is more than just a joke. Captive labor is a very old and well-established means of doing business in Alabama and the whole of the American south for that matter. I highly recommend Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name which describes the system of labor that neatly replaced slavery in the south between Reconstruction and just the time of the Second World War.

In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers.

One of the worst lies conservative lawmakers tell when they propose "tough-on-immigration" legislation like Alabama's is that they're interested in protecting American jobs and living standards. Instead, they've been pushing in a very different direction. Remember ALEC? The conservative model legislation mill whose Summer meetings in New Orleans occasioned an embarrassingly stupid protest march? Prisons and prison labor have been at the front of their agenda for quite some time.

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

It's interesting to me that both Colbert and Moseley have taken a recent shine to fraudulent Republican Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer. Phony as ever, Roemer is currently attempting to glom his campaign onto whatever momentum the Occupy Wall Street Protests could potentially generate. Buddy could probably get himself elected President of Twitter right now. But when one's memory extends to whatever was contained in the most recent 140 character outburst, one tends to forget that during the 1990s push to expand prison labor, Buddy was at the head of the movement. Here's an ad from Buddy's 1987 campaign for Governor where he promises to "put the prisoners to work"



Our modern day version of Roemer, Governor Bobby Jindal, has supported not only the practice of leasing prisoners but actually selling the prisons themselves to private management firms which could then sell forced labor for profit.

If the numbers in that Times article are correct and the flood of cheap illegal migrant labor into the US market has slowed to a negative creep, then the confused rhetoric Republican Presidential candidates have been blurting about the need to fence it out is even more absurd than first thought. Maybe it's time to pay closer attention to their plans to fence it in.