updated 7:41 p.m. ET, Mon., Dec. 15, 2008

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Gunmen staged four attacks on police within a half-hour period, killing four officers in a Mexican border city overrun by drug violence, an official said Monday.

Authorities are investigating whether the attacks Sunday night were coordinated, municipal police spokesman Jaime Torres said.

More than 40 Ciudad Juarez police have been killed this year, many of them in attacks blamed on drug gangs trying to consolidate territory. Many officers have quit out of fear for their lives, often after their names have appeared on hit lists left in public.

Another such list naming 26 officers was found early Monday at a dog racing track near the bodies of four civilian men, Torres said. One of the four had been decapitated, and a Santa Claus hat had been placed on his head. A fifth man who survived was left bound and gagged next to the bodies.

In Sunday night’s violence, two officers were killed at a guard house outside a hospital. Another policeman was killed and a policewoman was injured when gunmen opened fire on a neighborhood guard station. The fourth officer was shot and killed while sitting inside his patrol vehicle at a park alongside the Rio Grande.

Gunmen in a car also opened fire on a municipal police station across from the Chihuahua state government offices, but nobody was hurt.

Across border from El Paso
Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, has been the worst-hit city in a surge of drug-gang homicides sweeping Mexico. More than 1,300 people have been killed in the city of 1.3 million this year.

Across Mexico, more than 5,300 people have died in gangland-style killings in 2008 — more than double the number last year, according to government figures.

Millions of Mexicans celebrated the Day of the Virgen de Guadalupe on Friday. Yet as Mexico’s female patron saint was venerated several events brought to light the dangers faced by Mexican women.

Silvia Vargas had gone missing since September 2007 and her kidnapping symbolized the anguish felt by thousands of families throughout Mexico. “I have cried. I have begged… Find my daughter. Find my Silvia,” pleaded her father- Nelson Vargas- last month as he angrily denounced police incompetence in finding his daughter.

On Thursday, Nelson’s worse nightmares came true as prosecutors said to have found Silvia’s remains. “We ask everyone to pray for her and all those people who have suffered the same pain that we have felt” the family said in a written statement. Silvia was buried today at a funeral attended by dignitaries including Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Vargas’ death was tragic but so have the unsolved deaths of nearly 400 women in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. Despite lip service by the federal government, these deaths continue and have gone largely in impunity.
It is in that light that a women’s rights activist from Ciudad Juarez won Mexico’s National Human Rights Award. For over a decade Esther Chavez has run a campaign to bring global attention to dangers faced by women:

Chavez says women continue to be murdered in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and the city is now also in the grip of a wave of killings linked to the drug trade.

“Events of extreme brutality define the daily life of my city,” Chavez said. “Law enforcement, even with the necessary police investigations and punishment for crimes, will never solve the root problem, which is social inequality, poverty (and) a lack of educational opportunities.”

Image- CNN (“Silvia Escalera stands next to a banner asking for the release of her daughter in Mexico City in August.”)
Sources- AP, CNN, Univision, Amnesty International USA, Javno

One group of victims in an increasingly violent Mexico is journalists. The death of Bradley Will in Oaxaca two years ago comes to mind though those killed are mostly locals like “top crime reporter” Armando Rodriguez who was gunned down last month. Is it any wonder that in 2007 Reporters Without Borders named Mexico the second-most dangerous country in the world for journalists?

Thus, it’s disheartening to read that some Mexican officials are trying to sugar-coat such a dangerous situation for journalists:

Only three of 25 reporters who died violently in the last two years in Mexico were killed because of their work, the country’s special prosecutor for crimes against journalists said Tuesday.

Octavio Orellana said most of the reporters who died were bystanders in attacks against other people, were killed in accidents or committed suicide. He said several victims who worked with media outlets were not reporters.

The motives behind most reporters’ deaths “are similar to what affects the rest of Mexicans,” Orellana added, referring to sharply increased murder rates across the country.

The reaction from the Committee to Protect Journalists was to justifiable blast Orellana for “cherry-picking statistics” rather than effectively combating those who target journalists.

While Orellana feels it’s his duty to be a lame spinmeister, Mexican journalists and their families continue to live in fear of threats and being killed. Just ask Rodriguez’ 8-year-old daughter who sat with her dad as he was riddled with bullets.
Sources- Committee to Protect Journalists, csmonitor.com, AFP, Gothamist, AP

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — As the photographer pulled his 2000 Ford Explorer into a soccer field, the crackle of his police scanner was broken by a lone accordion riff.

The riff, a fragment of a “narcocorrido” glorifying drug smugglers, was an announcement that the death toll in Mexico’s drug war _ already above 4,000 this year _ had just risen.

Hector Dayer already knew that as he looked out at the seven bodies, bound, beaten and repeatedly shot. What he didn’t know was whether yet another colleague was among the victims.

Two weeks earlier, Dayer had photographed a friend _ a veteran crime reporter from a rival newspaper _ shot dead in his car as his 8-year-old daughter sat shaking in the passenger’s seat.

On this day, none of the bodies belonged to journalists. Dayer grabbed his camera, pulled up the collar of his jacket to hide his face, and stepped out to photograph the carnage.

“We should wear ski masks, like the police,” said Dayer, a father of two who works for the newspaper El Norte. “We are so public. Everyone can see us and identify us.”

Mexico is the deadliest place in the Americas to be a journalist, and among the deadliest in the world. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 24 have been killed since 2000, and seven have vanished in the past three years.

Many of the victims had recently reported on police ties to cartels. Some are suspected of accepting drug money, but it’s hard to be sure because the killings are barely investigated. Of the 24 cases, the committee says, only one has been solved.

Some attacks target specific journalists, others entire newsrooms. In at least two cases, grenades have been thrown at newspaper offices. The attacks are silencing journalists and undermining Mexico’s young democracy. Across the nation, news media have stopped reporting on the drug war, with most limiting their reports to facts put out by authorities, with no context, analysis or investigation. In most places, journalists don’t even report on killings they witness.

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Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s bloodiest city with about 1,400 deaths this year, is an exception. Here journalists continue to cover the daily deaths, without using bylines or photo credits.

Many use different cars and routes to get to work each day. A few wear bulletproof vests, but most think those make them more of a target.

Nearly all crime reporters have received threats. They include Armando Rodriguez, 40, a veteran with the newspaper El Diario. In February, Rodriguez asked the state prosecutor for protection, but she asked him to file a police report and he never did.

On Nov. 13, Rodriguez sat in his driveway with his 8-year-old daughter, waiting for her 6-year-old sister to come out so he could drive the girls to school. Gunshots rang out.

Rodriguez’s wife, Blanca Martinez, screamed as she looked out the kitchen window. She saw her husband’s head bent down and thought he was searching for his cell phone to call his newspaper to report the gunshots.

Then she realized he wasn’t moving. Their daughter was shaking in the seat next to him.

Martinez ran out and told her daughter to get inside the house, then climbed into the car with her husband, holding his bloody body until police and colleagues arrived.

“I don’t have any hope the guilty will be caught,” she said. “All I want is for them to repent.”

The colleagues who showed up to cover Rodriguez’s death were shaken too.

“I took photos but afterward we all didn’t know what to do,” Dayer said. “There was just silence.”

Rodriguez’s desk at El Diario is much as he left it, notebooks and police communiques stacked haphazardly. El Diario director Pedro Torres says he wants a full investigation, but police have shown little interest.

Hours after The Associated Press asked the office of Mexico’s attorney general why nobody had examined Rodriguez’s computer, El Diario editors say federal investigators called to say they were sending someone to pick it up. The attorney general’s office never got back to the AP.

“We’re not interested in making him a martyr. We just want the truth,” Torres said. “We feel so helpless, so angry _ but not afraid. Because, I insist, you cannot do journalism with fear.”

Jorge Luis Aguirre, director of news Web site La Polaka, agrees. As he was driving to Rodriguez’s wake, his cell phone rang.

“You’re next,” said a voice.

Aguirre parked his car, called his wife and fled to the U.S. with his family. He plans to apply for asylum.

“Any journalist in Juarez is at risk right now of being assassinated just because someone doesn’t like what you published,” he said in a telephone interview from hiding.

Media-freedom groups are pushing for the U.S. to grant such requests, and are lobbying Mexico’s Congress to pass a bill that would make attacks on the news media a federal crime.

“This violence has gone way beyond the press,” said Carlos Lauria of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “It’s going against freedom of expression.”

It is also insanely brutal. Dayer has seen the worst of it this year, from human legs protruding from a large pot commonly used to cook pork, to a body hanging inside a house with a pig mask over the face. When the death count reached eight in the span of an hour, he called his wife and told her to take the kids inside.

Once, as he photographed a headless body hanging from an overpass, someone noticed a man in a car nearby taking pictures of the journalists. A photographer went over to ask what he was doing, but the man sped away. Later in the day, the head was found in a trash bag at the foot of the city’s 28-year-old Journalist Monument, a statue of a newspaper delivery boy.

“I think about that day a lot now,” Dayer said.

Juarez’s journalists take extraordinary risks for their daily blood-and-gore reports. They careen through traffic, often arriving at crime scenes before the police. Photographers have stumbled across hitmen who fired shots, pistol-whipped them and stole their cameras.

On a recent morning, an AP reporter accompanied a TV crew as it plied the streets looking for the day’s dead. The police scanner reported an armed man in a white car nearby, and the driver swung into pursuit. A wailing police car raced up behind the crew, as TV and radio correspondent Ever Chavez screamed at the driver.

“Not too close! Get back!” he said.

The police car stopped the white car and dragged out two men as Chavez moved in with his microphone. Police pulled a black handgun from one of the men’s pockets, but it turned out to be plastic. Chavez went on the air.

“That’s the report we have so far,” Chavez said cheerily. “Be careful out there, and have a good morning.”

Dec 3 2008 – NACLA News

John Ross

The fiery November 4th crash of a private Lear jet here not a mile from Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, that killed President Felipe Calderón’s closest collaborator Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño was largely buried by the U.S. press, coming as it did on Election Day USA and the subsequent eruption of Obamamania.

As Interior Secretary responsible for domestic security, Mouriño who had just met with outgoing U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to map out bilateral drug war strategies, was the second most powerful official in Mexico.

Also killed in the crash that took a total of 19 lives was Mexico’s former drug czar Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, himself a frequent assassination target for Mexican drug gangs. Last spring Vasconcelos was replaced as top dog at the SIEDO (”Sub-prosecutor for Special Investigations into Organized Crime”), which he had directed for eight years and appointed special drug war advisor to Calderón.

The Calderón administration has fought hard to spin the plane crash as an accident despite public incredulity, pinning the mishap on the inexperience of the pilot and co-pilot of the privately owned Lear Jet, both of whom were killed on impact. Transportation Secretary Luis Tello has held serial press conferences presenting the black box retrieved from the crash and flogging expert testimony from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Aeronautics Administration. The bamboozlement campaign has been accompanied by a burst of government-bought print ads and electronic spots that are designed to boost the president’s credibility as the second anniversary of his chaotic swearing in approaches.

Nonetheless, the public remains archly skeptical. In a country where the government and the media relentlessly fudge and lie about everything from unemployment numbers and the depth of the recession to its questionable successes in the drug war, no one quite believes the plane crash was an accident. Indeed, ever since writer Sara Sefchovich whose new hot title is “A Country of Lies,” launched an Internet page inviting readers to list Calderón’s biggest lies, the “accident” has been at the top of the list.

The fiery November 4 plane crash in which Mouriño and Vasconcelos were snuffed is an apt metaphor for the current state of Calderón’s drug war, which, after an embarrassing round of high level arrests of anti-drug officials, appears to be similarly going down in flames.

Felipe Calderón first declared his anti-drug crusade just days after being sworn in as Mexico’s president two years ago this December 1, a job he was awarded in a July 2006 election that half of all Mexicans thought he won by fraud. In a move to bolster his pretensions of authority, the new president sent 30,000 troops into the field to confront the drug cartels—the number has since increased to 45,000, or a third of the Mexican Army.

Since December 2006, 6,000 Mexicans have been slain in drug war combat, 4,000 alone this year, with no notable reduction in the drug flow north to the United States. Hundreds of troops and police officials have perished in the past 23 months in addition to dozens of innocent civilians gunned down by soldiers at highway checkpoints and other collateral damage and over a thousand complaints against the drug war troops have been registered with the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH.) Between 20 and 30 corpses, many without heads, are clocked in every 24 hours in battleground states like Chihuahua and Sinaloa matching Baghdad in its bloodiest days, with no end in sight.

Rattled by persistent scandal, Mexico’s lead anti-drug agencies are in turmoil and the detention of dozens of top officials in recent months, including the nation’s liaisons to the United Nations Drug Agency, Interpol, and even the U.S. Embassy here, has shaken Washington.

Among those in custody is Santiago Vasconcelos’s replacement at the SIEDO, Noé Ramírez Mandujano, who is reportedly being held on a 40-day investigation warrant at the agency’s heavily fortified headquarters in the Ixtapalapa delegation (borough) of the capital, charged with accepting $450,000 USD monthly payments from a branch of the Sinaloa Cartel under the thumb of the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who are presently embroiled in a bloody turf war with their former boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán, the dean of Mexican drug lords.

At the time of his detention, Noé Ramírez served as Mexico’s representative before the United Nations Drug Agency in Vienna.

According to the released testimony of ex-SIEDO intelligence officer Fernando Rivera, now in a U.S.-run witness protection program, agency officials have been servicing the Sinaloa Cartel since 2004. In addition to Ramírez and Rivera, four military officers have been arrested for feeding drug war intelligence to the Sinaloa boys.

Another drug warrior currently under arraignment is Ricardo Gutiérrez who headed up the national office of Interpol and sat on the agency’s international commission. According to the Interpol Internet page, such commissions “share crucial information about crimes and criminal activity with other police agencies,” a job description that must send shivers down the spine of U.S. drug fighters who worked with Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez’s successor at Interpol Rodolfo de la Guardia is also in custody.

As a bonus to the public’s incredulity, the Calderón administration is spinning the scandals as “Operation Clean House” (”Limpieza”), an in-house investigation into drug war corruption, and promotes the revelations of dirty dealing as a “victory” in its anti-drug crusade. “Operation Clean House” has triggered a festival of stoolies and “soplones” (”snitches”), many of whom are being held incommunicado at the fortress-like SIEDO headquarters in Ixtapalapa. Other key whistleblowers are in U.S. custody—reportedly, it was Washington that tipped Mexican authorities to the Sinaloa Cartel pay-offs after an informer known only as “Felipe” spilled the beans to Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

The current round of recriminations is reminiscent of the 1997 arrest of General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, then head of the Mexican Drug War apparatus under president Ernesto Zedillo, for protecting Juárez Cartel kingpin Amado Carrillo who earned his nickname “The Lord of the Skies” by flying DC-6s loaded with Colombian cocaine into the country under the nose of the Mexican military. The General, who is now serving a 45-year sentence, was found to be living in a luxury apartment paid for by Carrillo’s agents who showered him with lavish gifts of fine tequila and classic cars. At the time of his arrest, General Gutiérrez had just returned from Washington where he attended a White House drug conclave and was lauded by Bill Clinton’s drug czar General Barry McCaffrey as having “an impeccable reputation for integrity.”

One of the more enigmatic personages swept up in the Operation Clean House dragnet is Javier Herrera, once number two at the Federal Investigation Agency or AFI, a knock off of the U.S. FBI, and an entity deemed so corrupt that Calderón has ordered it dismantled. Herrera was dismissed after his brother, a police commander in the gulf coast state of Tamaulipas, was cited on a narco-list compiled by the murderous “Zetas”—the enforcers for the Gulf Cartel.

The AFI and the Federal Preventative Police or PFP that operates under the supervision of the Secretary of Public Security (SSP), commanded by Calderón disciple Genaro García Luna, have gone nose to nose over drug war jurisdiction ever since 2006 with frequent confrontations between the two agencies, and in cleaning out his desk at the AFI, Javier Herrera carried off a raft of documentation that appears to implicate Garcia Luna in what he terms “a simulation” favoring the Sinaloa Cartel over other drug gangs.

Indeed, the former AFI commander was en route to an interview with a Televisa prime time news show when he was arrested November 17th by the PFP and his documentation confiscated. According to his lawyer, Silvia Raquenel Villanueva who presented x-rays to the press, Herrera was beaten so badly that he suffered several broken ribs.

Raquenel Villanueva is herself a Mexican drug war legend. The lawyer, who has represented many of the nation’s most notorious drug barons, has been repeatedly shot by her clients or their rivals (lung, head, buttocks, and stomach)—one cartel gunslinger plugged her eight times. Bombs have been tossed at her Monterrey offices and she was once imprisoned for her alleged involvement in the kidnap-killing of a police commander. Raquenel wears the ultimate badge of her trade—two narco-corridos (drug ballads) have been composed in her honor: “La Mujer de Acero” (”The Woman of Steel”) and “The Ballad of the Bullet-proof Lawyer.”

Despite the daily dollop of scandal hanging over his head, Public Security Secretary García Luna continues to cling to his job, an “Untouchable” in the Chicago sense of the word. Just this past week (Nov. 25), Garcia Luna’s former personal secretary Mario Arturo Velarde, was dragged into Ixtapalapa for questioning—Velarde is being defended by one-time attorney general Antonio Lozano and high-priced litigator Diego Fernández de Cevallos, both prominent members of Calderón’s PAN party. Speculation about why Calderón continues to stick by García Luna centers on two hypothesis: (a) Calderón is reluctant to fire his Secretary of Public Security because it would be the final blow to the president’s credibility and (b) Garcia Luna knows too much.

Calderón’s attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora, who preceded García Luna at the SSP, seems to be cloaked in a similar shroud of impunity.

The disarray in Calderón’s drug war hierarchy has grave implications for both U.S. and Mexican national security. In an interview with Proceso magazine’s J. Jesus Esquivel published this Sunday (Nov. 30th), out-going White House drug advisor John Walters warns that Mexico is at risk of becoming a narco-state.

As U.S. drug warriors lose confidence in their Mexican counterparts, the threat of compromised intelligence looms large. Nonetheless, Washington now has the legal and diplomatic wherewithal to take matters into its own hands. Under the recently ratified Merida anti-drug Initiative and the ASPAN or North American Security and Prosperity Agreement that provides a framework for the integration of the security apparatuses of the three NAFTA nations, Washington reserves the right to take action south of the border should it feel its national security threatened.

Designated as the U.S. southern security perimeter by the Colorado-based North Command, which is charged with protecting the homeland from terrorist infiltration, preventative incursion into Mexico to neutralize the drug cartels is not an unlikely scenario for the incoming U.S. president Barack Obama.

“All Things Considered” did a twenty minute segment today on the massacre at Tlatelolco that features the testimonies of several of the protesters:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97546687&ft=1&f=1004

For a country that’s trying to tackle rampant crime the results of a recent report are a black eye for law enforcement.

According to a recently released report, 49.4% of nearly 56,000 Mexican police officers have failed background and security exams. The number of policemen cited in the report represents roughly one in five of the country’s total number of cops, and were tested by using tests like psychological profiles and polygraph machines.

The report should raise eyebrows north of the border since it cited several northern Mexican states as embarrassingly unskilled:

In Baja California, home to the border city of Tijuana, some 89 percent of police tested failed, and only 4 percent were judged “recommendable.” Officers there have been periodically disarmed, detained and investigated by federal investigators and army troops on suspicion of aiding drug traffickers.

The shocking report comes at a time when Mexican forces have their backs to the wall in trying to stem the tide of drug-fueled violence. Small strides have been made to combat corruption in Mexico’s police including the arrest yesterday of an officer accused of being involved in a September massacre near Mexico City.

Image- ABC News (“Police investigators work at a crime scene where seven bodies were found gunned down in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico, November 25, 2008.”)
Sources- The Latin Americanist, Toronto Star, AP, La Plaza, IHT

Mexico’s economy is slowing–remittances from abroad are down, as is U.S. demand for Mexican exports. But one sector is doing a brisk business–the funeral industry near the U.S. border (Reuters). Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began his offensive against drug cartels and organized criminals in December 2006, drug-related killings have escalated, as has the need for undertakers. Though the drug war receives minimal attention north of the border, some authorities say it increasingly threatens the stability of the Mexican state and poses a security threat to the United States.

Calderon has moved aggressively against Mexico’s drug cartels. He has deployed over thirty thousand soldiers across the country, purged several police forces of corrupt members, and pushed a judicial reform package through Congress. But the violence has only mounted. More than four thousand people have died in drug-related violence this year, up from more than 2,500 deaths in 2007. The escalation is so great that drug gangs are widely suspected of causing the plane crash in early November that killed the interior minister, though the government says pilot error was the cause (NYT).

The drug cartels’ infiltration of the police, judiciary, and political parties has severely compromised the government’s ability to fight the drug cartels, some experts say. As Alma Guillermoprieto writes in the New Yorker, the end of one-party rule in Mexico precipitated the need to run expensive election campaigns, which the drug cartels are reported to now fund. The Mexican army is considered relatively clean, but its deployment has presented new opportunities for corruption, and causes tension with local security forces.

Experts say little progress will be made until Mexico’s police and judiciary are reformed. Mexican professor Ana Laura Magaloni, speaking at the Wilson Center in May 2008, says the focus should be on state-level reforms of the criminal justice system. In the meantime, concerns mount about drug-related violence spilling across the border. “International drug cartels pose an extraordinary threat both here and abroad,” said U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in September 2008. Mexico’s drug gangs could be a greater threat to the United States than global terrorism, adds John P. Sullivan of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

Calderon has sought U.S. assistance to tackle the problem. A new aid package known as the Merida Initiative (PDF) will provide $400 million in equipment and communications systems this year, with plans for further funding in the next two years. Some Mexican and U.S. analysts criticize the package for its focus on equipment rather than training and institution building. Others note that the package does not address how to reduce U.S. drug demand.

Drug trafficking is not the only issue of mutual interest between Mexico and the United States. Mexico is the third most important source of oil to the United States but output has been dropping since 2005. A package of energy reforms passed Mexico’s Congress on October 28, but industry experts say it likely does not go far enough to attract the kind of private investment needed to build capacity.

Immigration also complicates the U.S.-Mexico relationship–the majority of illegal immigrants in the United States are Mexicans. The U.S. Congress failed to pass immigration reform legislation in 2007, but some are hopeful that President-elect Barack Obama might revive the issue. It was one of the topics he discussed with his presidential rival, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in a November 17 meeting aimed at building bipartisan momentum for congressional initiatives. A recent CFR Independent Task Force on U.S.-Latin American relations recommends a U.S. guest worker programs, legalized a path to citizenship, and addressing circular migration for agriculture workers.

WASHINGTON, DC (November 17, 2008) – A new survey released today shows that that 50% of Americans and 47% of Europeans think immigration is more of a problem than an opportunity, but a closer look shows nuanced views of immigration and integration on both sides of the Atlantic and marked differences within Europe.

Seven years after Sept. 11, majorities on both sides of the Atlantic do not believe that immigration increases the likelihood of terrorism; only 35% of Europeans and 40% of Americans say that more immigration leads to increased risk of terrorism. On the other hand, 52% of Europeans say that immigration will increase crime in their society, and they were joined by 47% of Americans.

The inaugural Transatlantic Trends: Immigration (http://www.transatlantictrends.org/) public opinion survey addresses immigration and integration issues including national identity, citizenship, migration management policies, national security, and the economic opportunities and challenges brought on by migrants.

“As the top destinations for migrants, the United States and Europe face the same challenges of immigration and integration, and can learn from each other,” said Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “And in this time of concern about the economy and national security, the topic of immigration is especially salient. This survey will call attention to the development of fair, coherent policies that will affect migrants at both the domestic and international levels.”

Transatlantic Trends: Immigration is a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, with support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (U.S.), the Compagnia di San Paolo (Italy), and the Barrow Cadbury Trust (U.K.). It measures broad public opinion in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Other key findings include:

IMMIGRATION is “MORE OF A PROBLEM” FOR ALL BUT THE FRENCH AND THE DUTCH

The average European response is similar to U.S. opinion on whether immigration is “more of a problem” or “more of an opportunity,” with 47% in Europe and 50% in the United States saying it is “more of a problem.” However, the European average masks differing views among European countries on this issue. The United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Poland all have majorities or pluralities defining immigration as “more of a problem,” while pluralities in both France (46%) and the Netherlands (42%) say it is “more of an opportunity.”

ILLEGAL, NOT LEGAL, IMMIGRATION IS THE BIGGEST CONCERN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC

Real anxiety about legal immigration exists, but it is dwarfed by concerns about illegal immigration: more than 40% of respondents on both sides of the Atlantic express concern only about illegal-not legal-immigration. Additionally, significant numbers of respondents in Europe (29%) and the United States (37%) are not worried about either legal or illegal immigration.

U.S. AND EUROPE AGREE: JOB AND LANGUAGE SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT FOR ADMITTANCE

In an era when points-based immigration systems are frequently discussed, respondents were asked to rate a number of characteristics for potential immigrants. They were not asked to rank the criteria, but rather to attribute importance to each characteristic separately. An overall majority across the Atlantic underlines the importance of having a job offer before being admitted to the country (87% in Europe and 77% in the United States). Another criterion for admittance deemed equally important is knowledge of the national language (87% in Europe and 89% in the United States).

TEMPORARY LABOR SCHEMES ARE NOT SUPPORTED BY ANY COUNTRY

While policymakers are increasingly proposing policies to admit workers on a temporary basis, support for these policies among the public is not found in this survey. Only 26% in Europe and 27% in the United States think that legal immigrants should be admitted temporarily and then be required to return to their country of origin. In fact, 64% in Europe and 62% in the United States favor giving legal immigrants the opportunity to stay permanently.

COOPERATION WITH SENDING COUNTRIES GETS CLEAR “NO” IN THE U.S., MIXED REVIEWS IN EUROPE

A majority of Americans (56%) favor the United States managing immigration on its own, a sentiment shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. Indeed, only 32% in the United States think that migration should be managed in cooperation with immigrants’ countries of origin. In Europe, a majority (57%) support joint management with source countries, and only 40% favor management of immigration by their country alone. The higher support for joint management is driven mainly by the EU border countries of France (74%), Italy (73%), and Poland (58%), while Germany is split, with 50% for joint management and 48% against. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands are the outliers in the surveyed European countries, as they clearly favor national sovereignty on the management of migration (54% and 74%, respectively, favor a unilateral approach).

OVERALL SUPPORT FOR POLITICAL PARTICIPATION, SOCIAL BENEFITS FOR IMMIGRANTS

Majorities in Europe and the United States support a policy of guaranteeing that legal immigrants “have the same rights to political participation as the country’s citizens” (58% in Europe and 59% in the United States). Germans, however, were split, with 48% supporting and 50% opposing the policy. A close look at the U.S. opposition (37% overall) to granting political participation to immigrants reveals that 27% “strongly oppose” the measure. Nearly the same can be said for the United Kingdom, where the measure found overall support, but 22% of British respondents say they “strongly oppose” it.

A similar trend in the United States and the United Kingdom appears when respondents were asked whether immigrants should have access to the same social benefits as national citizens. While European and U.S. public opinion again supports this measure (73% in Europe and 63% in the United States), the portion of Americans who oppose it (34%) includes a high number of “strongly oppose” (24%). The same pattern holds true for the United Kingdom, where 57% supports access to the same social benefits as national citizens, but 26% “strongly oppose” the policy. Elsewhere in Europe, the highest support overall for granting social benefits is found in Italy (90%), the Netherlands (83%), and France (81%).

AMERICANS CONNECT CITIZENSHIP TO NATIONALITY MORE THAN EUROPEANS

On the issue of whether citizenship is important to one’s national identity, Europeans and Americans diverge slightly, with 95% of U.S. respondents and 81% of European respondents agreeing that it is. A more striking difference surfaces when one compared those Americans and Europeans who responded that they feel citizenship is “very important” to national identity, with 79% of Americans and only 48% of Europeans answering as such. For Americans, there is a much more intense connection between citizenship and national identity.

For the full report and top-line data, see www.transatlantictrends.org

SUPPORTING ORGANIZATIONS

Transatlantic Trends: Immigration is a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (www.gmfus.org), with support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (www.bradleyfdn.org), the Compagnia di San Paolo (www.compagnia.torino.it), and the Barrow Cadbury Trust (www.bctrust.org.uk).

METHODOLOGY

TNS Opinion was commissioned to conduct the survey using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews in all countries except Poland, where lower telephone penetration necessitated the use of face-to-face interviews. In each country, a random sample of approximately 1,000 men and women, 18 years of age and older, was interviewed. Interviews were conducted between August 29, 2008, and September 29, 2008. For results based on the national samples in each of the seven countries surveyed, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. For results based on the total European sample (n=6002), the margin of error is plus or minus 1.3 percentage points. The average response rate for all seven countries surveyed was 21%. The results for each country are weighted according to the following sociodemographic criteria: age, gender, region, and level of education within each country. The results for “Europe” are also weighted according to each country’s population size relative to the total population of the six European countries surveyed.

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NACLA  News, Nov 18 2008

Roberto Lovato

Lost in debates around immigration, as the United States enters its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, is any sense of the historical connection between immigration policy and increased government control—of citizens. Following a pattern established at the foundation of the republic, immigrants today are again being used to justify government responses the economic and political crises. Consider, for example, the establishment in November 2002 of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the largest, most important restructuring of the federal government since the end of World War II.¹ The following March, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was dismantled and replaced with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency under the newly established DHS. ICE’s rapid expansion—16,500-plus employees and near $5 billion budget—quickly transformed it into DHS’s largest investigative component, accounting for more than one fifth of the multibillion-dollar DHS budget. ICE is also the second-largest investigative agency in the federal government, after the FBI, responsible for enforcing more than 400 statutes, and is arguably the most militarized federal entity after the Pentagon.² Not long after its inception, ICE began to wage what many advocates have called a “war on immigrants.”

Beginning in fall 2006, ICE launched a campaign of workplace and home raids aimed at “getting tough on immigrants.” Thousands of heavily armed ICE agents were deployed in these high-profile raids designed, we were told, to find and deport undocumented immigrants. Since 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been detained in jails that constitute the fastest-growing part of the prison system in the country. The speed with which the militarization of migration policy took place left many questions. Why, for example, did the Bush administration move the citizenship-processing and immigration-enforcement functions of government from the more domestic, policing-oriented Department of Justice to the more militarized, anti-terrorist bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security? Most explanations view this transfer, and the relentless pursuit of undocumented immigrants that it enabled, as a response to the continuing pressures of angry, mostly white, citizens. Widespread fear and xenophobia following the September 11 attacks, together with the “anti-immigrant climate” fostered thereafter by civic groups like the Minutemen, Republican politicos, and media personalities like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, we are told, has led directly to the massive new government bureaucracy for policing immigrants. The Washington Post, for example, told us in 2006 that the rise of the Minutemen and their armed citizen patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border was “credited with helping to ignite the debate that has dominated Washington in recent months.”³

But while many can believe that there were ulterior motives behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, few consider that there are non-immigration-related motives behind ICE’s Al Qaeda-ization of immigrants and immigration policy: building a domestic security apparatus, one made possible by multibillion-dollar contracts to military-industrial companies like Boeing, General Electric, and Halliburton for “virtual” border walls, migrant detention centers, drones, ground-based sensors, and other surveillance technology for use in the Arizona desert that was originally designed for Middle Eastern war zones. Not to mention the de facto militarization of immigration policy through the deployment of 6,000 additional National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border; thousands of raids across the country; and the passage of hundreds of punitive, anti-migrant state and federal laws like the Military Commissions Act, which denies the habeas corpus rights of even legal residents who are suspected of providing “material support” to terrorist groups.⁴

This is not to say that public pressure from the anti-immigrant right played no role in the Bush administration’s immigrant crackdown. And another interpretation of the increased repression against immigrants is articulated by journalist David Bacon, who posits that the crackdown is purposefully meant to trigger an immigrant-labor shortage, which will eventually enable the government to establish the migration policy it’s been pushing for all along: a temporary guest-worker program.⁵ While that is surely part of the government’s response, such conclusions fail to explain why the government needs to deploy its military might to deal with gardeners, maids, and meatpackers. Such explanations fail to consider how reasons of state, the logic of government, figure heavily in the Bush administration’s historic and massive government restructuring. By framing such militaristic measures as targeting noncitizen immigrants makes it easier for citizens to swallow the increased domestic militarism inherent in increasing numbers of uniformed men and women with guns in their midst. As David Cole put it in his Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (The New Press, 2005): “What we are willing to allow our government to do to immigrants today creates a template for how it will treat citizens tomorrow.” Constant reports of raids on the homes of the undocumented immigrants normalize the idea of government intrusion into the homes of legal residents.

In order to understand how and why ICE now constitutes an important part of the ascendant national security bureaucracy, we must first look at the intimate relationship between national security policy and homeland security policy. In July 2002, the Bush administration introduced its “National Strategy for Homeland Security,” a document that outlines how to “mobilize and organize our Nation to secure the U.S. homeland from terrorist attacks.” Two months later, the administration released the more geopolitically focused “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” whose purpose is to “help make the world not just safer but better.” September 11 provided the impetus to create a bureaucratic and policy environment dominated by security imperatives laid out in two of these documents, two of the most definitive of our time, which outline strategies that “together take precedence over all other national strategies, programs, and plans”—including immigration policy, which receives considerable attention, especially in the section on homeland security strategy.

By placing other government functions under the purview of the national security imperatives laid out in the two documents, the Bush administration enabled and deepened the militarization of government bureaucracies like ICE. At the same time, immigrants provided the Bush administration a way to facilitate the transfer of public wealth to military-industrial contractors through government contracts in a kind of Homeland Security Keynesianism. The role of the private sector is also made explicit on a DHS webpage called “Information Sharing and Analysis,” which says that the department “is responsible for assessing the nation’s vulnerabilities” and that “the private sector is central to this task.”

Such dealings are provided for in the two Homeland Security strategy papers, which call for DHS to “establish a national laboratory for homeland security” that solicits “independent and private analysis for science and technology research.” This materialized in ICE’s budget, which has resources for research and development of technologies for surveilling, capturing, detaining, and generally combating what politicos and Minutemen alike paint as the Malthusian monster of immigration. Immigrants not only justify but make possible such massive state expenditures—at great human cost.

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Shortly after the September 11 attacks and the creation of DHS, the Bush administration used immigrants and fear of outsiders to tighten border restrictions, pass repressive laws, and increase budgets to put more drones, weapons, and troops inside the country. Government actions since 9/11 point clearly to how the U.S. government has set up a new Pentagon-like bureaucracy to fight a new kind of protracted domestic war against a new kind of domestic enemy, undocumented immigrants.

In the process of restructuring the immigration bureaucracy, national security concerns regarding threats from external terrorist enemies got mixed in with domestic concerns about immigrant “invaders” denounced by a growing galaxy of anti-immigrant interests. This should not have come as a surprise: In times of heightened (and often exaggerated) fears about national security, immigration and immigrants are no longer just wedge issues in electoral politics; they transform into dangerous others who fill the need for new domestic enemies. Immigrants can provide the rationale for expanding the government policing bureaucracy in times of political crisis, economic distress, and major geopolitical shifts. At a time when less than 18% of the U.S. population believes it is living the American Dream, according to one poll, the state needs many reasons to reassert control over the populace by putting more gun-wielding government agents among the citizenry.⁶

A brief look at historical precedents for this kind of government anti-immigrant action yields the conclusion that this instrumentalizing of immigrants to build up government policing and military capabilities is, in fact, a standard practice of the art of statecraft. The historical record provides ample evidence of how national security experts, politicians, elected officials, bureaucrats and other managers of the state have used immigrants and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies as a way of normalizing and advancing militarization within the borders of the United States.

Long before the Patriot Act, DHS, and ICE, policies linking immigrants to the security of the country formed an important part of U.S. statecraft. Like many of the newly established countries suffering some of the political and economic shocks of economic and political modernization in the late 18th century, the fledgling United States and its leaders needed to simultaneously consolidate the nation-state established constitutionally in 1787 while also maneuvering for a position on a global map dominated by the warring powers of France and England. Central to accomplishing this were immigrants, who provided both a means of rallying and aligning segments of the populace while also legitimating massive expenditures toward the construction of the militarized bureaucracies meant to defend against domestic threats to “national” security, threats that linked external enemies, real and perceived. In response to the devastating effects of economic transformations, thousands of French, German, Irish, and other immigrants led uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion and Shay’s Rebellion, which were viewed as threats by elites, especially the Federalists.

In the face of both popular unrest and competition for political power, and in an effort to consolidate the state and the globally oriented mercantile and pre-industrial capitalist economy, Alexander Hamilton and then president John Adams did what has, since their time, become a standard operating procedure in the art of U.S. statecraft: build the state and insert its control apparatus in the larger populace by scapegoating immigrants as threats to national security. The period before and after the passage of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which gave Adams, the father of the national security state, unprecedented powers. Fearful of Jacobinism’s influence, Adams secured the authority to unilaterally deport any immigrant he deemed a threat to national security. According to historian John Morton Smith, the internal security program adopted by the Federalists during the Adams administration “was designed not only to deal with potential dangers from foreign invasion . . . but also to repress domestic political opposition.”⁷ In this context, immigrants became the domestic expression of the threat represented by the French Jacobins, the subversive threat of the early 19th century. Indeed, the modern use of the word terror first enters the language when Edmund Burke gazed across the English Channel and, in his Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (1796), used it to describe the actions of the Jacobin state. Burke’s conservative U.S. cousins then adopted the term and applied it to French-influenced immigrants and others considered subversive.

Another major buildup of the government policing apparatus took place during the Red Scare of 1919. The U.S. government faced several economic and political pressures, including the end of World War I, the demobilization of the army, returning troops, joblessness, depression, unemployment, and growing inflation. The precarious situation gave rise to increased elite fear of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrant workers in the era of the Bolshevik revolution and an increasingly powerful, and militant, labor movement. Socialists, Wobblies, and other activists staged 3,600 labor strikes involving 4 million workers, many of whom were led by and were immigrants. Government and big business had to watch as fully one-fifth of the manufacturing workforce staged actions.⁸ Massive organizing by Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and race riots in northern cities further stoked elite fears.

Like other national governments of the period—and in contrast to today’s era of outsourcing—the United States had begun intensifying the centralization of functions formerly carried out by the private sector, including keeping labor and other dissidents in check. In the words of Regin Schmidt, author of The FBI and the Origins of Anti-Communism in the United States (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000): “In response to social problems caused by industrialization, urbanization and immigration and the potential political threats to the existing order posed by the Socialist Party, the IWW and, in 1919, the Communist parties, industrial and political leaders began to look to the federal government, with its growing and powerful bureaucratic organizations to monitor, and control political opposition.”

FBI historian John A. Noakes concludes that “the domestic unrest during this period presented the Bureau of Investigation the opportunity to expand its domain and increase its power.”⁹ Major expansion of the state through the building of new bureaucracies (Bureau of Corporations, Department of Labor, Federal Trade Commission, etc.) and bureaucratic infighting for government resources and jurisdiction turned the largely immigrant-led unrest into an unprecedented opportunity for A. Mitchell Palmer and his lieutenant, J. Edgar Hoover, who just five years after the scare went on to serve as the director of the Bureau of Investigation, later to become the FBI, where he became the most powerful nonelected official in U.S. history.

During the raids, thousands of immigrants were surveilled, rounded up, and deported during the Red Scare’s Palmer Raids. In what sounds like a precursor to the current ICE raids, local police and federal agents collaborated around immigration. According to FBI historian Kenneth D. Ackerman, in his Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007): “Backed by local police and volunteer vigilantes, federal agents hit in dozens of cities and arrested more than 10,000 suspected communists and fellow travelers. They burst into homes, classrooms and meeting halls, seizing everyone in sight, breaking doors and heads with abandon. The agents ignored legal niceties such as search warrants or arrest warrants. They questioned suspects in secret, imposed prohibitive bail and kept them locked up for months in foul, overcrowded, makeshift prisons.”

Sound familiar? Ackerman concludes: “Almost 90 years later, today’s war on terror exists in an echo chamber of the 1919 Red scare.” It was in the era of the Red Scare that talk of establishing a border patrol began, after Immigration Service authorities were overwhelmed by the tasks demanded of them after the United States entered World War I in 1917. “Thus,” concludes Joseph Nevins in Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2001), “the roots of the U.S. Border Patrol are to be found not only in concerns about unauthorized immigration, but also (and perhaps more so) in a preoccupation with matters of national security as related to the boundary.”

During the Great Depression, Mexicans in the United States were scapegoated for the economic hard times, as public xenophobia for the first time turned against them (having previously been fixated on the Chinese and “undesirable” Europeans). According to historians Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez in their history of this program, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (University of New Mexico Press, 1995), calls to “get rid of the Mexicans” resulted in the INS’s Mexican repatriation program (1929–37), which, like today’s war on immigrants, relied heavily on warrantless mass raids and arrests—which “assumed the logistics of full-scale paramilitary operation,” according to a history of the program—with detainees routinely held incommunicado before being shipped off to Mexico. According to California’s Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, passed in 2005, about 400,000 U.S. citizens and legal Mexican residents were forcibly removed in California alone; nationwide, an estimated 2 million people of Mexican descent were forcibly relocated to Mexico.

Complaints of INS abuse were legion, and a 1932 government commission on the matter concluded: “The apprehension and examination of supposed aliens are often characterized by methods [which are] unconstitutional, tyrranic and oppressive,” as quoted in Decade of Betrayal. The program represented the INS’s entry into the national security realm. This was cemented in 1940, when the Roosevelt administration transferred the agency from the Labor Department to Justice, home of the FBI. Indeed, Roosevelt, who a year later would begin detaining and interning Japanese Americans en masse, played a key role in framing immigration and the border as a national security issue. In the context of World War II, this often centered on keeping out “enemy aliens,” and as Nevins notes, for this reason, the Border Patrol personnel was almost doubled and played a role in the war, managing enemy alien detainment camps and helping defend the east coast. Again, we see the ways in which immigrants—in this case Japanese and Mexican immigrants—provide the state with the means to circumvent laws designed to protect the people from their government.

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As shown in the examples from U.S. history, immigrants provide the state with ample excuse to expand, especially in times of geopolitical and domestic crisis. During the post-revolutionary period, the pursuit of alleged immigrant subversives led to the massive funding of the Navy and to the expansion of state power through laws like the Alien and Seditions Acts. Similarly, the crisis following the end of World War I led to the creation of the FBI and to unprecedented government repression and expansion embodied by the Palmer raids. Viewed from a historical perspective, it is no surprise that the government should respond to the geopolitical and domestic crisis in the United States with expanded government power and bureaucracy. Rather than view the placement of ICE under DHS as solely about controlling immigrant labor or about political (and electoral) opportunism disguised as government policy (both are, in fact, part of the equation), it is important to connect the creation of ICE and its placement under DHS to the perpetual drive of government to expand its powers, especially its repressive apparatus and other mechanisms of social control.

From this perspective, the current framing of the issue of immigration as a “national security” concern—one requiring the bureaucratic shift toward “Homeland Security”—fits well within historical practices that extend government power to control not just immigrants, but those born here, most of whom don’t see immigration policy affecting them. One of the things that makes the current politico-bureaucratic moment different, however, is the fluidity and increasing precariousness of the state itself. Like other nation states, the United States suffers from strains wrought by the free hand of global corporations that have abandoned large segments of its workforce. Such a situation necessitates the institutionalization of the war on immigrants in order to get as many armed government agents into a society that may be teetering on even more serious collapse as seen in the recession and economic crisis devastating core components of the American Dream like education, health care, and home ownership.

Perhaps the most salient difference between today’s security state and those of the past is the central importance of the private sector. And unlike the previous periods, the creation of massive bureaucracies superseded the need to surveil, arrest, and deport migrants. Today, there appears to be a move to make permanent the capacity of the state to pursue, jail and deport migrants in order to sustain what we might call the migration-military-industrial complex, following Deepa Fernandes, Targeted: National Security and the Business of Immigration (Seven Stories Press, 2007). Several indicators make clear that we are well on our way to making the war on immigrants a permanent feature of a government in crisis.

Multibillion-dollar contracts for border security from DHS have created an important new market for aerospace companies like General Electric, Lockheed, and Boeing, which secured a $2.5 billion contract for the Secure Borders Initiative, a DHS program to build surveillance and other technological capabilities (see “Barricading the Border”).¹⁰ That some saw in 9/11 an opportunity to expand and grow government technological capabilities—and private sector patronage—through such contracts, can be seen in DHS’s “national laboratory for homeland security.”

Like its predecessor, the military-industrial complex, the migrant-military-industrial complex tries to integrate federal, state, and local economic interests as increasing numbers of companies bid for, and become dependent on, big contracts like the Boeing contract or the $385 million DHS contract for the construction of immigrant prisons.¹¹ Like its military-industrial cousin, the migrant-military-industrial complex has its own web of relationships between corporations, government contracts, and elected officials. Nowhere is this connection clearer than in the case of James Sensenbrenner, the anti-immigrant godfather, who sponsored HR 4437, which criminalized immigrants and those who would help them. According to his 2005 financial disclosure statement, Sensenbrenner held $86,500 in Halliburton stocks and $563,536 in General Electric; Boeing is among the top contributors to the congressman’s PAC (Sensenbrenner also owns stocks in the Olive Garden restaurant chain, which hires undocumented workers.)¹² The current war on immigrants is grounded in the need to build and maintain massive policing bureaucracies like ICE and DHS. The immigrant-rights movement must clearly understand this if it is to succeed in its strategies for the right to migrate, the right to work, and the right of migrants to share the fruits of their own labor.

2. “Special Report: Homeland Security Appropriations for FY 2005 (House & Senate) and California Implications,” the California Institute for Federal Policy Research, September 16, 2004.

3. Alec MacGillis, “Minutemen Assail Amnesty Idea,” The Washington Post, May 13, 2006.

4. “Militarizing the Border: Bush Calls for 6,000 National Guard Troops to Deploy to U.S.-Mexican Border,” Democracy Now!, May 16, 2006.

5. David Bacon, “The Real Political Purpose of the ICE Raids,” Dollars & Sense, January/February 2007.

6. “The American Dream Survey 2006,” Lake Partners Research, August 28, 2006.

7. John Morton Smith, “President John Adams, Thomas Cooper, and Sedition: A Case Study in Suppression,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42, no. 3 (December 1955): 438–65.

8. Todd J. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York’s Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919–1923 (Routledge, 2003).

9. John A. Noakes, “Enforcing Domestic Tranquility: State Building and the Origin of the FBI,” Qualitative Sociology 18, no. 2 (June 1995): 271–86.

10. Martie Cenkci, “At Technology’s Front Line,” Air Force Outreach Program Office, Outreach Prospective 5, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 2006): 10–11.

11. Alexandra Walker, “Sensenbrenner: Immigration Profiteer,” The Real Costs of Prison weblog, October 5, 2006.

12. Roberto Lovato, “Sensenbrenner Under Fire—Does Congressman Profit From Undocumented Labor?” New America Media, October 6, 2006.