Is the U.S.’s focus on small-time immigration infringements leaving the nation more vulnerable? Gottschalk's book is "Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics" (http://goo.gl/QcSkJh).
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Transcript - In the moment we’re talking a lot about reform and the potential now to build down the carceral state and we’ve ignored or overlooked places where it’s rapidly growing. And so what we’re seeing now is law enforcement and immigration enforcement are colliding or converging where they used to be quite separate systems. And we're essentially criminalizing the enforcement of immigration policy. So during the Reagan years we had about 20,000 or 25,000 deportations a year. Under President Obama we’ve had about 400,000 deportations a year until recently. So it’s a dramatic increase in the number of people that are being deported. Many of them being deported back to countries that they left as children where they don’t speak the language and being deported for minor violations or for violations that they committed many years ago and have not committed a serious crime since then. So now what we’re seeing is very similar – I feel like we’re living through the 1960s and 70s again where we criminalized race in the 1960s and 70s and now this great unease that we have in the society and anxiety has landed on immigrants. And that’s even prior to Isis and the San Bernardino killings and things like that.
And so we’ve created this misperception now that immigrants bring crime and increase crime rates when the data actually tells us that immigrant populations suppress crime rates in gateway cities. And in cities that are not gateways for immigrants with smaller cities they neither suppress nor increase the crime rate. But we’ve created this misimpression now that immigrants are bringing lots of crime to the United States and are destabilizing force. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/YhMiVH.
