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In the moment we’re talking a lot about reform and the potential now to build down
the carceral state and we’ve ignored or overlooked places where it’s rapidly growing.
And so what we’re seeing now is law enforcement and immigration enforcement are colliding
or converging where they used to be quite separate systems.
And we're essentially criminalizing the enforcement of immigration policy.
So during the Reagan years we had about 20,000 or 25,000 deportations a year.
Under President Obama we’ve had about 400,000 deportations a year until recently.
So it’s a dramatic increase in the number of people that are being deported.
Many of them being deported back to countries that they left as children where they don’t
speak the language and being deported for minor violations or for violations that they
committed many years ago and have not committed a serious crime since then.
So now what we’re seeing is very similar – I feel like we’re living through the
1960s and 70s again where we criminalized race in the 1960s and 70s and now this great
unease that we have in the society and anxiety has landed on immigrants.
And that’s even prior to Isis and the San Bernardino killings and things like that.
And so we’ve created this misperception now that immigrants bring crime and increase
crime rates when the data actually tells us that immigrant populations suppress crime
rates in gateway cities.
And in cities that are not gateways for immigrants with smaller cities they neither suppress
nor increase the crime rate.
But we’ve created this misimpression now that immigrants are bringing lots of crime
to the United States and are destabilizing force.
No I think one point that’s important to make is that the largest population now in
the federal prison system are Hispanics.
They’re the largest plurality, larger than whites and larger than African Americans.
And many of them are there for immigration related offenses.
So again when we try to think about the carceral state in black/white terms we really need
to think about immigration because again drug crimes fueled a lot of the growth of the federal
prison system but immigration crimes are far few and much more.
And the other thing to think about immigration is that if we care about crime and we care
about protecting our borders prosecuting so many petty immigration offenses and so punitively
is taking up all the resources of people on the border and so that as many federal prosecutors
will tell you we’ve had many studies don that they’re not pursuing the big drug crimes,
they’re not pursuing the big money laundering, the big trafficking of weapons in part because
so many resources are going into prosecuting and taking care of these petty immigration
offenses.
So that in fact we’re making ourselves more vulnerable rather than less vulnerable by
having 80 percent of our prosecutors time and their cases being taken up with petty
immigrants at the cost of these much more serious crimes and threats.