The immigration debate is one that has been going on in America for decades with no end in sight. And part of the reason that we never get any real solutions is because immigrants mean big money for corporations, and now the private prison industry is trying to cash in on America’s immigration problems. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The immigration debate is one that’s been going on in America for decades with no end in sight and part of the reason that we never get any real solutions is because immigrants mean big money for corporations. I mean, massive money. Now they’re getting ready to make more money. Okay. You and I have talked about this so many times. It’s the essential, it’s the bottom line for immigration. Okay. We used to have corporations shipping jobs overseas. They’d ship ’em to China, India, they still do, but they’re running into some deep water there. Okay. Because finally those people are saying, hell no, I’m not gonna work for 50 cents an hour. I wanna be paid like you would pay folks in the US. So now the Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industry said, I know what we’ll do. We will just bring ’em over the border. Okay. So what, five, 6 million, 7 million people over the border. The numbers in here, I’ll take a look in just a minute, but it’s millions of people coming over the border to work for low wages and corporations that, as we’ve said before, they lose an arm, hell, just ship back to Nicaragua. It doesn’t make any difference, you know? They don’t have any kind of protection. Pick it up from there, would you.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so now a new industry says, hey, well, look, we see the automotive industry getting this. We see the factory farming industry. We want a piece of this. And of course, that industry is the private prison industry. Because most of these people who do come through and they go through the system legally, they still have to go through monitoring, GPS monitoring, for most of them that are released back into the United States pending their immigration hearings.
Mike Papantonio: The number, by the way, is 5.7 million. That the actual, that’s the number. So.
Farron Cousins: So we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of people per year that essentially get outfitted with these GPS monitoring devices. So the private prison industry, GEO Group, CoreCivic, they say, listen, we actually kind of own the companies that are doing this anyway.
Mike Papantonio: We’re in the money.
Farron Cousins: Well, they do own it. So they’re trying to lobby the administration to tell them, hey, why don’t you release even more people for the GPS monitoring? We’ve got all the devices here. We’re more than happy to monitor two.
Mike Papantonio: Ankle monitors.
Farron Cousins: 3 million people a year.
Mike Papantonio: We’re gonna give you a phone. You must have it on all because we wanna monitor. You have to have the ankle bracelets that we monitor you. And while your case is pending, this is what we’re gonna do. And they’re gonna make so much money doing this that they’re moving, I mean, first of all, the lobbying they’re doing to improve their possibilities of doing it, they’re spending millions.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Just this year. Millions of dollars on lobbying for that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. So they know how, what the payday is on this. So if you’re an immigrant and you came over here and you said, well, I want a better life, question is, well, do you mind doing it with an ankle bracelet, with an ankle monitor? Or do you mind us putting a chip in you so we know where you are all? That’s where it’ll come to. That’s really where it’ll come to.
Farron Cousins: And part of the other lobbying pitch for the private prison industry is, hey, not only give us the contracts, but that way, obviously we’re monitoring the devices. If they become unresponsive, well, we own the jail. We’ll just throw ’em in here.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right. That’s right.
Farron Cousins: So, they get double.
Mike Papantonio: They’ve done such a great job with prison, right? The prison, these are the same people. The prison people who have been doing private prisons, which has been a disaster, are now saying, well, maybe we didn’t get that right, but we can do this. We can do this. That’s kind of their pitch right now.
