Immigration Reform and the Federal Prison Population

Immigration Reform and the Federal Prison Population

 

Last night (October 21) I attended a dinner for the Federal Bar Association, and the keynote speaker was US District Judge Tom Schroeder of Winston-Salem.  His main point was that we are on an unsustainable path regarding incarceration rates, and the statistics he gave were sobering, to say the least.  Among them:

 

About ½ of all federal inmates today are Hispanic

4 out of 5 of the Hispanic inmates are there due to non-drug related crimes

Most of those 80% are prosecuted for re-entry violations

It costs some $29,000 per year to house an inmate in federal custody

Federal correction expenses represent the second fastest growing part of the federal budget.

 

He also had a lot of other statistics about unwed mothers and fatherless children, but what struck me was the fact that, if immigration reform is passed, we could quickly erase 40% of the federal Hispanic jail population.

 

It is folly to make it a crime to re-enter the US in order to work and support a person’s family.  That is why the vast majority of the undocumented population is in the US:  working, saving some money, paying taxes, staying out of trouble, and raising their families.   In 1942 Congress recognized that it was vital to US national security to create a visa program (the Bracero Program) to allow essential Mexican workers to enter the US and staff our agricultural industry, our manufacturing industries and other industries that required manual labor.  US-born workers were overseas, fighting in World War II.   The economy, and the war effort, would have crashed without those essential workers.  The Bracero program lasted some 22 years, until Congress revamped the entire immigration system in 1965; unfortunately Congress left out a visa for those workers.

 

Fast forward to today:  it is vital to US national security to create a visa program (the RPI and W visa, as contained in S. 744) to allow undocumented workers to remain here, and for future essential workers to enter the US, so that they can staff our agricultural industry, our manufacturing industries and other industries that require manual labor. 

 

The difference between now and 1942 is that the threat to US security (and world security) was much more visible – the Axis powers.   But it is no less real today, where few if any US workers want to take hard yet important jobs on which our economy depends.   Work that is hard and dirty is no less important or honorable than work done in an air conditioned office.    We simply need to recognize that all work is valuable and reform our immigration laws to acknowledge that fact.

 

Gerry Chapman