10/11/20
By Tom Cartwright
WHY WE WITNESS – THE MACHINE
(Opinion)
To be sure the past month or so has been filled with horrendous events including unaccompanied children held in hotels by transportation specialists, despicable medical conditions and encounters at Irwin Detention Center, detainee deaths reaching an all-time annual high, and ICE Air activity at record in-pandemic levels, just to name a few.
While these incidents are individually abhorrent and deserve our attention, we have to stay focused on the fact that they are merely products of a corrupt system; an apprehension, detention, and deportation machine (“The Machine”) that has fueled itself for over seven decades with an amoral ideology supported by two main pillars. These individual incidents deserve our attention and outrage, but not only as individual incidents, but as a thread in the fabric of a decades old corrupt system.
Ethno-nationalism as an ideology is not new. It has been a driver of anti-immigrant policy not just in the US but across the globe for many decades. It stands on the myopic foundation that certain ethnic and racial groups should be favored within the nation. Religion is often a dimension as it may be affiliated with a certain ethnicity.
The Machine is a manifestation and an enabler of this ideology in the US and two powerful pillars have kept The Machine grinding away: profit and cruelty. They, of course, are not the only enablers, but they have been powerful and persistent over the years.
The first pillar supporting the ideology is profit, both in terms of dollars and power. There are tremendous profits available to private companies operating The Machine, detention facilities, air charter companies, guard and transportation service companies, to mention a few. All are volume driven one way or the other. From a revenue perspective, the more activity the more the profit. Some argue that “minimum revenue” contracts protect from volume driven abuse. The fact is there is no antidote for greed. Contract minimums only encourage contractors to drive more volume to push past the minimums into premium revenue, either in terms of the number of detainees/deportees, or the duration of detention, to drive up revenue. Profits can also be enhanced by operating at the lowest cost possible, even at the expense of detainees/deportees that are under the care of the for-profit contractors. Sub-standard facilities, nourishment, medical and mental care, legal aid, and training are examples we see reported every day.
It’s not just the greed for profit that stokes The Machine, it’s the greed for power; power for the individuals and the organizations that operate the gears of The Machine. A recent example of that is the reward bestowed on Chad Wolf this week as the Senate Homeland Security Committee advanced his confirmation as Secretary of DHS to the Senate: a sign of a successful guidance of The Machine in pursuit of its ethno- nationalistic ideology; personal power, augmented by the ascendant organizational power of DHS as the administration’s police force.
The second pillar supporting the ideology is the policy and practice of deterrence by terror which has been used for over 7 decades by INS and DHS. Terror is visited not just on those who have been turned back, apprehended at the border, or detained, but on those undocumented and living in the US, some for decades. The underlying principle is that the more cruelty that is employed the less likely people will try to seek asylum in the US. Cruelty and inhumanity are levers of The Machine at every point. Despite the fact that deterrence by terror has not worked
Over all these decades, the culture and practice persist. It will never work. Not as long as the terror The Machine inflicts is less than the terror faced in the lands from which migrants flee. Why is that so hard to understand?
What is curious is that these two pillars are actually opposing forces, if one has ultimate success, the other one fails ultimately. If profit prevails above all, then The Machine is fueled by an unlimited number of detainees/deportees and it gorges on what will become intolerable profits. If terror and cruelty ratchet past the limits of what asylum seekers can stand The Machine will starve. Yet, these two countervailing forces have found a satanic equilibrium, coexisting and allowing each to thrive.
The People have (and I hope will continue to, although I’m not sanguine about that now) provided an imperfect governor to both profit and terror. When greed for money or power go beyond what The People can stand, the remedy is to change those in power, with People in the streets and at the ballot box.
When terror becomes more egregious than The People can stand, as was the case with family separation, the remedy is outrage in the streets, in Congressional offices, and at the ballot box.
THAT IS WHY WE WITNESS.
It is our job to do whatever we can to witness, add transparency, and to spark righteous outrage and action. To see what The Machine does not want us to see. To document the facts. To tell the story. To help our allies, the press, and legislators to do the same. We hope that we speak not just to those in our bubble, as we might with this opinion section, that the facts in this report speak to those wh o may have different views, but who are open to reconsider them when presented with a reality that is new to them.
Transparency and outrage are necessary, but not sufficient. Unless there is a dramatic and discontinuous change in the support for the ethno-nationalist ideology and a destruction of its pillars of power, The Machine will just remain at equilibrium, a place it has been for decades. Our only hope lies in the obliteration of ethno-nationalism because only that will provide the will to destroy The Machine. It will not be sufficient to chip around the foundation of one or both of the pillars of profit and cruelty, they must be crushed under the weight of a new ideology of inclusivity and compassion.
To be honest, that feels a long way off. But what else can we do but start?
“False Profit,” painting by Mear One