What Is the “Immigration Industrial Complex”?
Maintaining a flow of undocumented immigrants in and out of the United States means big money for many companies
As Donald Trump burnt a phosphorous trail through the 2016 Presidential election—greased with fears of rampaging, criminal “illegal immigrants” — he typically left one important facet of the immigration subject unmentioned: Who is hiring these undocumented immigrants? And why do these employers receive so little of his ire? After all, if no one hired these immigrants, they wouldn’t come here, would they? So why the profound silence on the subject?
To answer that question, we have to learn a little about something that’s been dubbed the “immigration industrial complex.” Deepa Fernandes may have coined the term in her 2006 book Targeted, which focused on the subject of homeland security and immigration. She described how post-9/11, “[there] is big money to be made as the government dramatically increases its reliance on the private sector to help carry out its war on terror.” “On the home front,” she concluded, “the primary targets of this war are immigrants.”
In her 2009 paper “The Immigration Industrial Complex: Why We Enforce Immigration Policies Destined to Fail,” then University of Kansas professor Tanya Golash-Boza described…
