Your corporate dollars at work

NPR: Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Let me stop you right there.

If you've never seen Dark Star, you have to. It's seriously awesome. Okay. Go on.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.

"The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."

What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.

"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."

But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?

"They talked like they didn't have any doubt they could fill it," Nichols said.

That's because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona's immigration law.

Illegal immigration, you see, isn't just a politician's hobbyhorse to scare voters, but it's also big business.

One of my beefs with the political left is the notion that business is, basically in itself but especially in big corporations, inherently evil. As in this case, for real evil, you need the public sector. In 2010, the New York Times told us how this works:

NYT: Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

A particularly gruesome example was showcased in 2010 in Idaho:

CorrectionsOne.com: ACLU suing Corrections Corp. of America

BOISE, Idaho — The American Civil Liberties Union is suing state prison officials and a private company, claiming violence is so rampant at the Idaho Correctional Center that it's known as "gladiator school" among inmates.

The ACLU said it would file the lawsuit Thursday against Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corp. of America in U.S. District Court in Boise.

The lawsuit says Idaho's only private prison is extraordinarily violent, with guards deliberately exposing inmates to brutal beatings from other prisoners as a management tool.

The group contends the prison then denies injured inmates medical care to save money and hide the extent of injuries.

These are, indeed, corporate dollars at work, but the immigrant scare has been worked up by politicians, and the contracts for these facilities are arranged and approved by politicians. So in that sense, my headline there is a bit of a provocation. What it should actually say is "your elected representatives at work".

**

Ha ha, say European readers. Those crazy Americans!

Think again.

NYT: Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

So we're doing the same thing over here, as well.

I wrote about Finland's expanding private security sector earlier (in Finnish), and made the point that our problem isn't the privatization. Because especially this country woefully lacks any kind of real liberalism - in the classical sense - these days, the only people who draw attention to these abuses tend to be the leftists. For them, it's obvious that this is an example of how evil capitalism is. Because if only the state would run detention camps, then everything would be all right.

Yeah. And that's not just a joke, either.

Our problem is that our countries lack any kind of legal safeguards that would prevent public enforcement agencies and the private agencies they, in effect, deputize, from running over our civil rights. Even worse, our culture is permeated by racism, which tells us that whatever happens to people in immigration detention centers isn't any of our business, so not only are they deprived of their rights, but no-one here cares that they are. It's that racism, that lack of legal safeguards and that lack of caring that enables the policies and people who run the violent business of immigration today. In other words, it's us.

The economics of emigration

Read Michael A. Clemens's paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?, from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

The paper goes on to argue that not only are the negative economical effects of emigration, on both the country of departure and arrival, overestimated, but that the positive impact on the world economy is greatly underestimated. For instance:

In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime, despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages.

Or, in other words:

In my mind, what this simply means is that the most effective development aid we can give to third world countries is to let more of their citizens move here. This would lead to increased prosperity for us and them, or in other words, everyone. Most often, the economic argument against immigration is framed as in the video above. Perhaps the second-most common argument seems to assume that in each country, there are a fixed amount of jobs. Given that this involves jettisoning even the most basic understandings of how a market economy works, it's almost unbelievable that it can be advanced as an argument. To some extent, I suppose that speaks to the level of economic understanding imparted by our school systems.



There is no data that suggests that "unchecked immigration" would destroy Europe economically; on the contrary, there is data that much broader immigration would enrich the world immensely.

A snippet on immigration

From Johan Norberg:

Ok, the time has come to speak candidly about immigration and crime. American studies shows that there is a clear correlation: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born. This is true for the nation as a whole, for cities with large immigrant populations and for cities along the US-Mexican border, as Radley Balko explains in Reason.

Read his blog for more. That's some immigration criticism for you.

Immigration criticism and rationality

On the topic of the current discussion in and around my blog on immigration, I want to take a moment to register my exasperation at one particular aspect of these debates.

As a rule, a political position does not follow logically from facts. If a certain statistic says something, for instance, we can all agree 100% on the existence of that statistic, but disagree on what the proper political response to it is. If, say, deaths from traffic accidents are rising, there are innumerable different policies people can advocate in response to it.

What truly exasperates me in any discussion one has in Finland about immigration and refugees is that almost invariably, the so-called "immigration-critical" people insist that only their point of view is rational. In this discussion as well, I have been criticized by several people for not being rational, not advancing rational arguments and adhering to a "faith", presumably because I don't agree with their "immigration-critical" policies. These are the same people who bemoan a lack of "rational" discussion on immigration.

Based on my experience, which is far greater than I'd like, the great majority of Finnish "immigration-critical" people only accept as rational those arguments that they agree with. If you disagree, you are immediately vilified as someone who "does not admit the truth", or accused of being a "multiculturalist" who has a religious belief in immigration and is impervious to logical arguments.

The fundamental precondition for any sensible discussion on politics has to be an acceptance that the person you are arguing against is also rational, and holds a rational point of view. Here on my blog and in response to Vera Izrailit's posts, I've been trying to frame a rational criticism of an immigration policy based solely on limiting refugee numbers. In response, I have been vilified as irrational, making no sense, and an intellectual whore, among other things.

This is not an isolated phenomenon; far from it. So far, every time I've been involved in some kind of discussion about immigration and refugees in Finland, people who disagree with me have been seemingly enraged by the fact that I don't accept that they're correct. Practically every discussion so far had led, in short order, to personal attacks and total dismissals of all of my arguments as either dishonest or willingly false.

The fact that these same people then complain about a lack of rational discussion is, quite simply, the height of hypocrisy. I would offer this as a general guideline:

If you really think that your personal opinion on a political question is the only rational one, and that everyone who disagrees with you must therefore be doing so for either dishonest or religious reasons, you are in need of psychiatric attention or a careful rethink of your philosophy. Or at the very least a tin foil hat.

To Vera Izrailit, part III

Vera's latest here.

Unfortunately this conversation is threatening to become disingenuous to the point of sophistry.

The subject under discussion, however, is the cost that the Finnish society pays for accepting refugees, and the feasibility of accepting them in large numbers. For the purpose of this discussion it makes no difference whatsoever whether they do it because they have a lot of young men, because they are of a lower socioeconomic class, or because of any other factor.

Unless, of course, you are intending to correct those factors. Are you?

Yes. That is the entire point of my objection. Did you miss it?

To sum up, there are problems with the integration of refugees into Finnish society. The way I see it, there are two possible approaches to resolving these problems:

1) stop or limit the immigration of refugees because they cause problems. Crudely speaking, blame the refugees and stop them from coming to Finland.

2) try to fix the political and socioeconomic causes of the problems. Crudely speaking, blame Finnish society and the state, and try to fix them.

I don't know when you missed that I've been constantly trying to argue for option 2, or if you're just trying to score rhetorical points.

In my opinion, the problems associated with refugees are not a "refugee problem" as such but one manifestation of wider problems in Finnish society and politics. Blaming refugees for their problems and seeking a solution in stopping more refugees from coming to Finland not only does nothing to fix existing problems but also makes refugees the scapegoats for much wider problems.

To speak in economic terms, the cost of refugees to society is purely a question of socioeconomic costs and benefits. Currently refugees have problems assimilating to society and becoming productive members, i.e. net benefits to the state as opposed to a cost. In my mind, the only sensible solution is to address the problems that give them difficulty in assimilating.

On the other hand, the "immigration-critical" reply is to treat all refugees irrevocably as "problems" whose impact must be minimized. At best, an "immigration-critical" proposal like your idea of quotas and expulsions can only limit existing problems; it does nothing to fix them. I can't agree with that kind of policy.

To Vera Izrailit, part II

Vera's previous post here. This is a short answer only.

On the question of statistics, I'm not a social scientist, so I don't feel competent to comment on the statistics. The post I linked to and cited quoted sources on the adjustment of statistics to compensate for age groups and socioeconomic factors, and I'm not competent to critique those.

As for the socioeconomic factors - you are right, they do affect it. What difference does it make, though? Crime is still crime[.]

What difference does it make? All the difference in the world. It's totally dishonest to compare the entire Iraqi or Somali population to the entire Finnish population, when the Iraqi and Somali populations in Finland are made up of a totally different mix of social classes, ages and income classes than the Finnish population. I don't mean to be rude, but if you don't understand that, then I'm going to have a hard time believing you're qualified to be commenting in any way on statistics either.

In one sense, I'm presenting my argument badly, and I apologize for that. I want to point out a matter of principle here, and jumping from facts and statistics to principle like this is bad form. Nevertheless, the problem with arguing for accepting less refugees because previous refugees have committed crimes is, to me, totally unethical as it constitutes punishing future refugees for the crimes of other people.

I promise, as soon as Finland changes its policies in such a way that half of working-age refugees are self-supporting after 4 months of being here, I'll say "hurrah, let's get more refugees!" right here in this blog. In fact, if you can find any statistics of any refugee group doing so now, I can say "hurrah, let's get more of those!" now.

And this, really, to me is the core problem. If the problem is Finnish policies, not refugees, why on earth are you agitating against refugees, instead of for political change in Finland?

To Vera Izrailit

Vera dedicated an entire post to replying to my comment, so I'll extend her the same courtesy. The original post is here.

On to my reply.

First of all, I mistakenly assumed the number the Finnish immigration office gives on their page for admitted refugees is, in fact, the total number of refugees admitted to Finland. Apparently it isn't, so my bad.

It may not seem like a lot, but it's a lot for a country Finland's size. My "admitting everyone" in any case referred to a potential future situation where the number of applicants has risen sharply. Which is not all that potential anymore, now that their number has in fact risen sharply.

The number has risen sharply, but this is not indicative of a general trend. In fact, the number of refugee admissions provides an excellent example of how fundamentally dishonest people, like one J* H*-A* use statistics. Here, from the Finnish Immigration Service, are the numbers for refugee applications received per year in the 2000's.

2000: 3170

2001: 1651

2002: 3443

2003: 3221

2004: 3861

2005: 3574

2006: 2324

2007: 1505

2008: 4035

As you can see, 2007 was a record low in applications in the 2000's, while the 4035 applications of last year are only 200 more than in 2004. Looking at the numbers, there is so far no clear rising trend. So your potential future situation is a possible future situation.

Also, how is slightly less than 2000 refugee admissions in a year "a lot for a country like Finland"? That's, what, 0.0004 percent of our population of five million? Each year there are some 60 000 Finnish people born; admitting 2 000 refugees in addition to them doesn't exactly unbalance our population structure dramatically.

I don't see how this is a lot for Finland in any way.

I did not say "for a single crime", but "for a single serious violent crime". I was not suggesting that we deport people for shoplifting, chewing khat or even having a minor fight or cheating sossu out of a bit of money. Shit happens. When shit start happening to the extent of aggravated robbery with assault and battery, it's time to shovel it out. To me it's monstrous to let them stay.

To me it's totally monstrous to suggest that if a person makes one mistake, they're deported from Finland forever. It's the height of naïvete to assume, like you do, that a population can be divided into criminals and non-criminals, and we should expel all the criminals. If a policy like that had a positive effect on crime rates, there would be no crime in Britain because they expelled everyone who committe a "single serious violent crime" to Australia.

However, I feel the constitutional issue is more important, and you're actually quoting the wrong part of the Constitution:

Perusoikeudet
6 §
Yhdenvertaisuus

Ihmiset ovat yhdenvertaisia lain edessä.

I believe a case can certainly be made that revoking the refugee status of a person immediately on their commiting a crime and expelling them in addition to the regular punishment is treating them less than equally.

And yes, it doesn't say "citizens". Human rights in general apply to humans, not just humans who are citizens of your particular polity. There are very good reasons for this.

Foreigners are less equal. They can't vote, and they usually need residence permits to stay in Finland. Foreigners can be deported for a single crime, and sometimes are. A person who has come here to work is denied a residence permit renewal if he or she loses the job just before the renewal and doesn't immediately find a new one. People who come here to work don't get the same social security as Finns until they get a permanent residence permit, and if their contract is short enough, they don't get any social security at all. I am not even talking about the status of students.

Refugees, on the other hand, are holy cows who are sometimes impossible to deport even after a series of convictions for aggravated assaults, batteries and robberies.

This is a disingenuous argument, for a simple reason. The juridical difference between a refugee and a foreign national is very simple. Most foreign nationals can be deported to their country of citizenship, but refugees are considered to be fleeing from persecution by that country, which is why deporting them is an entirely different matter from deporting, say, a British national.

Equality before the law doesn't mean everyone who lives in the country has to be allowed to vote or to be paid Social Security, it means they have to be treated the same before a court. And if a Finnish citizen is sentenced to four months for robbery, but a Somali refugee is sentenced to four months plus deportation to a war zone for the same robbery, then they're rather obviously not being treated equally before the law.

"Finland is admitting less than one thousand asylum seekers per year, and this number is not going to change dramatically despite the fearmongering going on."

Would you like to define "dramatically", and the timescale?

I've done all this already in my Finnish blog, but for the purposes of this discussion, I don't see the massive flood of refugees that hatemongers like Halla-aho are predicting. The claim is theirs, and they have no evidence for it except saying so.

"But the idea that "something's gotta give" is just exaggerating the nature of the problem so much that it's hard to understand where you're coming from. I don't understand this Finnish "refugee hysteria" at all."

That's simple. First of all, people have noticed that the refugees are very much overrepresented in violent crime statistics and underrepresented in the employment statistics. Second, we have the unfortunate example of other European countries in front of our eyes. And third, the number of applicants is up.

This is a handy summary, so let's get to it.

First of all, I direct you to Heikki Kerkkänen's massive post on "immigration criticism".

Miksi Suomen maahanmuuttajaväestöstä väestöosuuteensa keskimääräistä isompi osa syyllistyy seksuaalirikollisuuteen?

Keskimääräistä isompi osuus seksuaalirikollisuudessa tiettyjen kansalaisuusryhmien kohdalla (joilla siis on muun kuin Suomen passi) on paitsi Iivarin (Stakes 2006) tutkimuksissa että Oikeuspoliittisen tutkimuslaitoksen tutkimuksissa esiin tullut fakta, jonka kieltäminen ainoastaan hankaloittaa sosiaalityön kehittämistä ja tärkeiden sukupuolijärjestelmää koskevien keskustelujen rakentavaa ja järkevää aloittamista. Se on liian tärkeä sosiaalipoliittinen kysymys jätettäväksi Halla-ahon tapaisten ksenofobisten diletanttien reposteltavaksi.

Ensin täytyy muistaa, ketkä rikoksiin erityisesti syyllistyvät: nuoret miehet. Lisäksi täytyy katsoa perinpohjaisesti kaikki taustamuuttujat. Oikeuspoliittisen tutkimuslaitoksen mukaan maahanmuuttajarikollisuutta on

"selitetty ensinnäkin maahanmuuttaja- ja kantaväestön sosiaalisen aseman, ikä- ja sukupuolirakenteen ja muiden kriminologisten taustamuuttujien eroilla. Lisäksi maahanmuuttajien on todettu kohtaavan syrjintää taustansa vuoksi esimerkiksi työmarkkinoilla ja yleensä arkielämässään. (Esim. Diesen 2005, 256–257.) Sen vuoksi tilastollisessa tarkastelussa olisi tärkeää vakioida sosioekonominen asema, perhesuhteet, ammattiasema, koulutus ja muut heidän sosiaalista ja taloudellista asemaansa kuvaavat tekijät (Iivari 2006, 36–
37; vakiointiyrityksistä esimerkiksi Ahlberg 1996, 45)." (Niemi, Honkatukia&Lehti 2008, 274)

Ilman vakiointeja selittävät muuttujat menisivät persiilleen kuin perussuomalainen "maahanmuuttokritiikki", koska esimerkiksi väestöryhmien ikärakenne on Tilastokeskuksen mukaan alla olevan näköinen:

Vakiointien jälkeen maahanmuuttajaväestön rikollisuus on Stakesin erikoistutkija Juhani Iivarin "Tuomittu maahanmuuttaja"(Stakes 2006)- teoksen mukaan 1,5- kertaista valtaväestöön nähden.

(...)

Väitän, että vakiointien jälkeinen rikollisuuden 1,5-kertaisuus on selitettävissä niillä eri tavoilla, joista Mukhtar Abib on puhunut (kursivointi meikäläisen, tarkoitettu allekirjoittamaan niitä asioita jotka itse näen keskeisimpinä):

"Moni somali on samaan tapaan sosiaalisesti huono-osainen kuin suomalaisetkin rikoksiin syyllistyneet. Mutta lisäksi heitä rasittaa syrjintä. Moni lapsi ja nuori kokee ahdistavaksi sen, että koulussa kaverit eivät hyväksy ja oman paikan löytäminen on vaikeaa. Kun lapsi yrittää kertoa kotona vanhemmilleen, että koulussa on ongelmia, tukea ei juuri tarjoudu, jos isä ja äiti ovat kielitaidottomia ja sopeutuminen suomalaiseen yhteiskuntaan kesken.
Tämä synnyttää vihaa ja katkeruutta. Tarjolla ei ehkä ole muuta puolustuskeinoa kuin samastua niihin suomalaisiin tai muunmaalaisiin nuoriin, jotka tekevät rikoksia.” (Helsingin
Sanomat 22.1.2006).

En allekirjoita Helsingin kaupungin sosiaaliviraston nuorisoyksikössä työskentelevän Abibin hieman ärsyke-reaktio-tyylistä näkemystä täysin, mutten näe sitä myöskään vääränä. Se on hyvä Helsingin Sanomien lehtijuttuun tehty tiivistys poikkeavien alakulttuuristen ryhmien synnyn lähtösyistä.

He uses rape as his example, but the same basic logic applies to all violent crime statistics. When we adjust for overrepresentation in the age groups that commit the most crime, the per capita violent crime committed by refugees is not markedly larger than that of the general population. When we take into account socioeconomic factors, the difference is easily accounted for.

So basically, taking all factors into account, refugees do actually commit crimes at approximately the same frequency as the general population.

Secondly, the unfortunate example of other European countries is something we have to be aware of, sure. But despite what Halla-aho and his like are peddling, Finland is a long way from having ethnic ghettos like those of Paris. What we need to learn from the situation in other European countries is how to stop it from happening here. In my opinion this means a stronger policy of integrating refugees and other immigrants into society, not demonizing them as criminals and trying to erect barriers of entry to stop them from coming here.

Third, the number of applicants is up from last year's record low, yes; we did this already. We'll have to see what happens. But applications would have to increase massively before we can really

**

To finish with your last thoughts:

I really wouldn't worry about refugees if they found jobs fast and committed crimes with approximately the same frequency as Finns. This is, unfortunately, not the case.

To start with finding jobs, this is a problem with our integration policies, not with the refugees themselves. I direct you to Eero Iloniemi's column in Nykypäivä:

Yksi maahanmuuton epämiellyttävistä totuuksista on, että heikko sosiaaliturva nopeuttaa integroitumista. Kun maahanmuuttajalla ei ole turvaverkkoa, hän on pakotettu etsimään töitä ja sopeutumaan.
Yhdysvallat on tästä selkein esimerkki. Se on onnistunut integroimaan uudet tulokkaat paremmin kuin yksikään toinen teollisuusvaltio. Yhdysvaltojen kansallisen maahanmuuttofoorumin (National Immigration Forum) mukaan maahanmuuttajat työllistyvät jopa kantaväestöä paremmin. Vaikka vain 11,5 prosenttia maan väestöstä on maahanmuuttajia, heidän osuutensa työvoimasta on 12,4 prosenttia.
Läntisistä teollisuusmaista vain Yhdysvallat, Kanada ja Australia ovat onnistuneet muuttamaan maahanmuuttajat kulusta tuloksi. Yhdysvalloissa maahanmuuttajilta saatavat verotulot ovat yli kymmenen kertaa suuremmat kuin heidän aiheuttamansa sosiaalimenot. Suomessa tilanne on lähes päinvastainen.

It's clear, to me, that the problem is not with the refugees but with our social security policy. We need to reorient our social security to encourage people to work.

In short, the reason refugees aren't finding jobs fast enough is, in my opinion, social democracy, not the refugees themselves. And as for violent crime, as I said, taking all factors into account refugees commit violent crime at approximately the same frequency as the Finnish population.

So this is my point: you don't need to worry. This is not nearly as big a problem as people like Jussi Halla-aho and other propagandists would have you believe. Nothing is going to "give" any time soon.

This is not to say that there aren't problems with refugees and their integration into Finnish society; far from it. I don't see any reason why we can't go about solving these problems in a constructive way and continue to admit refugees and other immigrants to Finland and see them become a net benefit to society.