Hartmann: Immigrants for Sale

Axel Woolfolk Caballero, founded/directs/produces Cuéntame. With the economy flailing - there's at least one industry - other than Wall Street and Big Oil - that's booming!
And that's the business of locking up immigrants. Not because there's more illegal immigration in America today - there's actually less - but because private prison lobbyists - with the help of paid-off lawmakers who write strict immigration laws like Arizona's SB1070 - are making sure more and more illegal - and sometimes legal - immigrants are rounded up and thrown in for-profit detention facilities around the country. Each new immigrant captured translates into over $70,000 a year for the private detention facility - so it's a pretty lucrative industry. As long as profiteers are in control our prison system - and buying off our lawmakers - then a compassionate and common sense approach to illegal immigration - and our legal system in general - will forever remain elusive.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Thom Hartmann
• Big Picture
• theBigPictureRT
• RTAmerica
• RT America
• RTTV
• Axel Woolfolk Caballero
• Immigrants for Sale
• prison
• Cuéntame
• Arizona
• SB1070
• ALEC
• immigration laws
• illegal immigration

[IamLEGIION]

Im going to open my shed and get few immigrants ive kidnapped over the years :)

[oblomov222]

@PatriotSue There is a long history of American expatriation. I would say that it began with certain wealthy classes and intellectual and cultural figures, and that it has generalized to a more broad slice of the educated and managerial classes, managing things for the armed services through the corp of engineers in places like Dubai or teaching English in Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. There are power disparities, but these are still forms of emigration, and what's more they're legal.

[PatriotSue]

@oblomov222 What countries do Americans have to run to, when we are desperate?

[oblomov222]

@PatriotSue Clearly, that is not the case. There is a great deal of discretion in the deportation process, although there are interests trying to reduce that humanistic, deliberative complexity to myopic dictates. Many people who come to the United States are fleeing repression, torture, and other forms of violence. I am careful, as I think you should be, about equating desperation and criminality/illegality.

[proyectozeta32]

@amaha7861 IGNORANCE i'm sorry 4 u :)

[amaha7861]

legal help this country great. This country never go down. But only problem is illegal immigrants that they never pay tax and they just want medical care and school for free. And make money for hell hold country that they came from. They don't the right way to stay in USA. I believe that the person who didn't break the laws in the land. They are the good of society.

[oblomov222]

@AiresQX4 Small potatoes; how about advocating a genuine human rights issue of some kind, where this sort of outrage might be appropriate? You'd probably feel better at the end of the day.

[oblomov222]

@PatriotSue If you want to live in a Draconian police state I guess you're entitled to want that, but I'd appreciate it if you could try to ruin some other country.

Incidentally, why not address the much larger crimes of economic exploitation these "illegal" acts of existing inside of imaginary borders are being motivated by.

If one were to apply a punishment fits the crime mentality, what would be the U.S.'s punishment for its criminal interventions in Latin America, this sort of patriotism?

[mad8london247]

@PatriotSue

Exacty, get rid of all those illegal aliens, especially those Europeans who brought in diseases like smallpox and measles.

Let the indigenous population free to breathe again.

[PatriotSue]

@oblomov222 Every ILLEGAL is guilty of the crime of being here, ILLEGALLY and the punishment, for that crime alone, is DEPORTATION. PERIOD.