General Immigration

Now that the federal government is up and running again, President Obama has announced that immigration reform is his highest priority. The country's biggest for-profit prison companies already pull in hundreds of millions of dollars a year locking up immigrants in federal custody. They stand to pull in even more money if the new laws generate lots of new prisoners.

And that, in a nutshell, has always been the private prison business model. Mass incarceration leads to massive profits. Read more >

October 21, 2013

Dave Weigel reads the tea leaves from Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue this morning, and concludes that the business community isn't going to press for comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon: Read more >

October 17, 2013

Immigrant rights activists in Oregon are asking the city of Portland to stop buying bonds from Wells Fargo, which has a mutual fund with shares in a company that operates immigration detention centers.

The request is part of a nationwide campaign to get investors to divest from private prison companies. Most recently, the campaign has focused on local institutions such as cities, counties and universities. Read more >

Some advocates and opponents of an immigration overhaul are already balking at a possible plan by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., that aims to make progress on a 2013 immigration reform bill in the lower chamber.

Politico reported Tuesday that Pelosi plans to introduce legislation that marries a comprehensive measure that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with a House border security bill. Read more >

Clarity and directness is the best way to communicate, so let’s give it a try.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform is dead. Many leftwing immigrant activists and analysts have been putting this view out for a while, but for political, ideological, and racists reasons these perspectives have been ignored in the mainstream immigrant advocacy movement.

This conclusion is justified when we take an overview of possible legislative scenarios. Each scenario has its proponents and detractors, but what is important for our work is their likelihood to materialize. Read more >

SEATTLE — The Border Patrol will share records of every traffic stop it makes on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for 18 months with immigrant advocacy groups as part of a settlement to a lawsuit that said agents were racially profiling people they pulled over.

The agreement settles a lawsuit filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project against the Border Patrol. The suit alleged that people were stopped and questioned for the way they looked and without reasonable suspicion. Read more >