Private prison executives recognized a fertile new market. Stepped-up enforcement on the border would yield larger numbers of undocumented immigrants bound for detention. Their companies positioned themselves to secure federal contracts to hold those immigrants in their own for-profit facilities.

In the estimation of some observers, these sorts of everyday enforcement actions have little bearing on the realities of illegal immigration, but a good deal of influence on the industry that now depends on the status quo for its succor.

Roberto Reveles, a Pinal County immigration reform advocate, has watched the detention system grow right alongside the heated rhetoric around immigration policy in his home state. The current stalemate over immigration reform has provided a perfect climate for businesses and politicians to thrive — “a reason for them to have a broken-down immigration system,” he says.

“You build a strong image of fear of these Mexican immigrants, which creates a moral justification for imprisoning them, and at the same time brings in lots of money,” Reveles says. “The politicians are not motivated to fix the immigration system. On the contrary, they’re benefiting from it politically and economically.”

read the entire article at Huffington Post.

This is the point we have been making for three years.

Apply the links between xenophobia and the schools and you will get the same results but with a positive and negative spin. If it would not be for undocumented and immigrant students how many schools would be shut? How many teachers would be laid off? How does the ADA fund gifted classes? Magnet Schools etc which neglect immigrants?

How do the schools and the prison industry profit from hate?

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