Neglected markets
There’s an upside to all this grabbing immigrant children away from their parents – MONEY.
Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.
Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.
Persecution and profit in one exciting package.
Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old to 17, are housed in nearly 90 facilities in 15 states — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
They are being held while their parents await immigration proceedings or, if the children arrived unaccompanied, are reviewed for possible asylum themselves.
That’s a lot of potential cash.
That lumps a lot of stuff together. Given that there are children that need to be take care of, it’s hard to object to the feds issuing payments to foster families. What percentage of the total is stuff like that, and what percentage is stuff like big corporations running for-profit shelters and squeezing out every dollar they can get?
The article mentions a number of recipients of this money to house children – “Southwest Key”, “Baptist Child & Family Services”, “International Educational Services” – but doesn’t mention if any attempt was made to see if those organisations have a history of lobbying for harsher border control policies (e.g. charging as many border crossers as possible with a felony) or any ties to the Trumps or other highly-placed government officials.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if some these organisations had not taken a leaf out of the prison-industrial complex’s playbook and worked very hard to ensure that draconian “tough border” policies were put in place that caused all this new “business” to come into existence.
That reminds me of a thought I had the other day.
It’s surprising that the Prisons for Profit industry didn’t get on board the BLM movement as you had those police officers ruining things by thoughtlessly killing all those potential incarcerees. [close snark]
It would not surprise me in the slightest if some these organisations had not taken a leaf out of the prison-industrial complex’s playbook and worked very hard to ensure that draconian “tough border” policies were put in place that caused all this new “business” to come into existence.
Quite right, Karellen, except for the taking-a-leaf bit. It’s the neoliberal thing. No, it’s the capitalist thing: neoliberalism is just the moral justification of capitalism. Of course, we had capitalism before, but a moral justification of it is more profitable. Any opportunity is good.