The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi

  Meanwhile, not one single employee of any foreign bank—not one banker from Barclays, Deutsche Bank, RBS, Dexia, Société Générale, or any of the other numerous foreign banks that have been caught up in the many serious fraud and manipulation scandals in recent years—has yet been deported or jailed for any crime connected to the 2008 financial crisis.

  So we’ve built a massive and ruthless police apparatus for the ordinary immigrant population, complete with a sprawling, essentially extralegal detention complex, to catch and detain people who have not committed any actual crimes.

  This gigantic, menacing complex of bars, chains, buses, and airplanes built to deal with the immigrant poor stands in stark contrast to the tiny, disorganized confederation of perhaps a few hundred lawyers policing transnational financial companies. We don’t have special jails for foreigners or executives from foreign firms who steal by the million or billion.

  So hundreds of thousands of people go to jail without committing crimes. Thousands or tens of thousands more commit extremely serious crimes, and no jail even exists to detain them.

  There’s a profound story here about what’s happening to the very idea of citizenship, be it individual or corporate, in the new global economy. It used to be that citizenship in a strong and healthy state was universally prized, because citizenship confers rights. But with citizenship also comes responsibilities, and it turns out that not everybody wants those. In the minds of some, if you can get the rights without the responsibilities, you’re really onto something.

  In other words, there’s a new class of people whose goal is to become above citizenship. Live in America, conduct your trades in the weaker regulatory arena in London, pay your taxes in Antigua or the Isle of Man. Keep the rights but offshore the responsibilities.

  The flip side is that there is a growing subset of people, like undocumented immigrants, who live below the level of full citizenship. If the first group is stateless by choice, these people are involuntarily stateless and have virtually no rights at all.

  For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what’s at the end of it.

  Gainesville isn’t quite Mayberry. It’s a bigger southern town that plausibly calls itself the Poultry Capital of the World. The economy here ebbs and flows with the fortunes of big chicken companies like Coleman Natural Foods, Prime Pak, Victory, Koch Foods, and Fieldale Farms. On one side of town, you can’t miss the smell, even with the windows rolled up.

  Once upon a time, most of the hardest labor in the chicken plants was done by black workers, and back then the area the workers lived in was called Niggertown. Then, after the Vietnam War, the town ghetto gained a Southeast Asian flavor with an influx of refugees, and the plants were suddenly manned by Vietnamese.

  Arturo Corso, who in the 1990s worked as an assistant district attorney here, recalls a famous tale about white Gainesville’s relationship to the Vietnamese community. In 1985 the town brought murder charges against Nguyen Ngoc Tieu, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnamese man who had allegedly stabbed a white woman named Debbie Rollins.

  “This was way before my time,” says Corso. “The trial starts, and one witness after the other gets up on the stand and points at the defendant. They’re saying, ‘Yes, that’s him, he did this, he did that.’ And every time they testify that he did something, the guy just sits there and says, ‘Not me, not me!’ ”

  Corso pauses and shakes his head.

  “A whole day of the trial goes by like this,” he says. “The second day begins and it’s the same thing—every time the witness points at the defendant, he keeps saying, ‘Not me, not me!’ And everyone thinks what he means is ‘I didn’t do it.’

  “They were almost done with the second day of the trial before they figured out that what he really meant was, he wasn’t Nguyen Ngoc Tieu! They had the wrong guy!”

  It turned out the court had screwed up and dragged another Vietnamese man, a thief named Hen Van Nguyen, up from the jails to sit at trial for the Rollins murder. The real killer’s own lawyer didn’t even notice. It was a landmark moment in the history of “they all look alike to me.” The judge declared a mistrial, but a month later the actual defendant, Tieu, was still sentenced to life in prison, despite the fact that most of the key witnesses had fingered a completely different person for the crime under oath.

  That incident might have been part of the reason the Vietnamese community packed up and left Gainesville en masse in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

  In their place came the Latinos, mostly from Mexico. Two decades ago Latinos made up 8 percent of the population here. By 2010 that number was 42 percent.

  But now the Latinos, too, are starting to leave, which may be part of a larger trend of Latino immigrants returning home as the American economy worsens, making the country’s less appealing sides less worth putting up with. In this small Georgia community, for instance, the endless roadblocks and car stops mean that most local Latino residents get around using an exhausting regime of taxis, buses, and bicycles, and the constant harassment wears on them. “People are leaving,” says Aaron Rico, Jose’s brother and another Fiesta cabdriver. “Go to a city or something. It is getting to be too much.”

  The war on immigrants in Georgia took an extraordinary turn in the middle of the last decade when the state passed a series of harsh laws outlining punishments for driving without a license. Passed in 2008, Georgia codes 40-5-20 and 40-5-120 created two completely different sets of punishments for the same crime.

  They dictated that a natural-born Georgia citizen who is caught driving without a license is innocent of the crime, provided he gets a license before trial. In other words, even if he is technically guilty of the crime at the time of arrest, he can be declared retroactively innocent, so long as he takes a trip down to the DMV and gets himself a license. He doesn’t even have to pay a fine.

  Meanwhile, an undocumented resident, who is not entitled to get a license before or after arrest, pays significant new penalties under the laws. He’s jailed for a minimum of two days (and a maximum of twelve), pays a fine of five hundred to a thousand dollars, and is convicted of a misdemeanor—or a felony if there are four offenses in five years.

  There are no other laws like this in America that provide retroactive amnesty to some while others face significant punishment for the same crime. Some immigration lawyers claim the Georgia statutes would seem to violate the U.S. Constitution in at least two ways, first by creating an ex post facto law (banned in Article 1) and second by violating the “privileges and immunities” clause.

  None of that matters: the laws are on the books, and since 2008 there’s been a sharp increase in the number of arrests of undocumented aliens for violating the no-license statute. The immigrants know this, which is why the daily effort to get to and from work has turned into something like an ongoing military campaign, with immigrants employing guerrilla strategies—cab networks, shared bicycles, carpooling, etc.—to try to avoid capture.

  The problem is, some immigrants have no choice but to stay and take their chances, working in businesses where a bicycle won’t cut it. Alvaro Fernandez*1 is one of those people.

  A native of Colombia, Alvaro has been in America for more than ten years and runs a successful construction business in the Hall County area, around Gainesville. He has good relationships all over the county, especially with former clients, but his problem is that he has to drive a truck to and from work to carry tools and equipment. “No cabs for me,” he says, shrugging and smiling.

  “I was driving home one night at about ten p.m.,” he says now. “And that’s when the odyssey started.”

  The giant dragnet created by 287(g) is inspiring a whole
new generation of epic survival tales. The stories you hear from people who’ve disappeared at checkpoints and roadblocks sound eerily like the literature of the Soviet gulag, with the same themes of repeat interrogations, marches, chains, total alienation from family, and clashes with harsh nature, lunatic bureaucracies, and petty human predators of every imaginable species, some wearing uniforms and some not.

  Alvaro came to America in 1999 with his wife on legal tourist visas. Like many of the Latino immigrants I interviewed for this book, he at one time had a legal driver’s license in America. “When I first came, I was able to get a license on my visa,” he says. “But when my visa expired, so did my license.”

  For a while, things were cool. Alvaro built up his business, doing so well, in fact, that he’s been able to buy farmland back in his native country, setting himself or his children up for a future life as Colombian rural gentry. But the document problem nagged. He needed a driver’s license. At one point, as a stopgap measure, he made what would prove to be a fateful decision and bought himself a fake Mexican driver’s license. “They were easier to get,” he says. And when he got in a car accident in the early part of the last decade, he showed police his Mexican ID, which left him with a definite footprint in the system, as a Mexican.

  All that past history came into play on the night in October 2010 when Alvaro was arrested at the checkpoint. He surrendered his truck and sat mute in the back of a squad car while two young white patrolmen took him to the local jail. He knew he would pop up in the system as a Mexican and, thinking it over in the car, silently made a command decision. If they sent him to Colombia, he realized, he might not see his wife and family again for a very long time, if ever.

  “I would never be able to come back,” he says. “Not from Colombia.” Logistically, it’s harder to make it to the United States from the other side of South America, as opposed to a bordering state like Mexico.

  So he decided to keep his mouth shut. Then when offered a stip order—the same deal offered to Ella and nearly every other detainee caught under 287(g)—he would take it. Instead of spending months in jail in America pending an immigration hearing, it might only be weeks. He’d be sent to Mexico, though he didn’t know where in Mexico, or how. And from Mexico, if he could find a way to connect with his family, he had a chance to have some money wired to him so he could buy a way back.

  Alvaro had no idea what to expect. A fit, leather-skinned man of about fifty, with a shock of jet black hair, jovial eyes, a pronounced nose, and high cheekbones, he comes across as a worldly fellow and a man of experience but not necessarily a tough guy. He had never been in jail before.

  “There were hard things, they were all hard,” he says now. “But the hardest thing was county jail. I was mixed in with really dangerous people.”

  When he got to the jail, Alvaro’s immediate concern was to call a relative, specifically his nephew, to let him know what had happened and to start planning a way out. There was a phone in the jail, and inmates were allowed a half hour a day to talk. When the jailers rounded him up in the morning for breakfast and a shower, Alvaro thought he could make a call, too, and walked to the phone.

  “What I didn’t know is that some of the black criminals in the jail ‘ran’ the phone,” he says. “We weren’t allowed to use it without their permission. I didn’t know and just walked up to the phone, started dialing. Before I knew it, someone jumped on me, started hitting me. I took a blow on the side of the head.”

  Other Hispanic inmates rushed to his aid. The fight subsided, but Alvaro still didn’t get to make the call. He tried a second time later on, and again he was attacked, only this time he fought back. “I hit the guy and knocked him down,” he says, with a bit of pride. “But the jailers came, and because I was fighting, they put me in the hole.”

  The hole, he says, was a special cell three feet by four feet, with a solid iron door, an opening to shove food through, and no toilet. There was just a hole in the ground.

  “It was really disgusting,” he says. “Actually everything about the jail was disgusting. Even the orange jumpsuit they gave us, it stank of sweat. The blankets also stank. And the hole, there was no air in there.

  “But I was lucky. I was out of there in four hours, transferred to the immigration detention center.”

  Alvaro’s trip wasn’t a long one. He moved to the North Georgia Detention Center, run by a private company called CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America. The CCA facility in Gainesville is basically a retooled version of an old city jail. In fact, it shares a building with the Gainesville Police Department. The facility, surrounded by giant coils of razor wire, is inopportunely located in a new enterprise-zone area of Gainesville, darkening the mood for the would-be yuppie-friendly coffee shop and poetry/arts center across the street.

  Still, the facility’s presence in the zone isn’t inappropriate; CCA represents one of the great enterprise models in this new phase of the American economy, which is rich in such public-private profit schemes.

  Alvaro’s experience hints at why. He moved from smelly jumpsuits and grimy blankets in the public jail to a Holiday Inn–like experience at CCA.

  “Oh, yeah, muy bonito,” he says. “Clean T-shirts. Clean underwear. Tres pares,” he says, flashing a thumbs-up and laughing. “You get a sandwich, a good sandwich, a box lunch. You get a bath. Seriously, you get little shampoos, toothbrushes, toothpaste, a brush for your hair, you name it. It’s all high class.”

  It should be. Depending on whom you believe, CCA receives upward of $166 per day from the federal government to care for immigrants like Alvaro, which is about four times what it used to cost the INS back in the days when the government took care of its own detainees.

  The big influx of cash impressed investors on Wall Street. Back in 2000, when the federal government began housing immigrant detainees in mostly privately run prisons, CCA’s share price hovered around a dollar. Today, as I write this in the summer of 2013, CCA’s share price is $34.34. It was at $23 just two years ago. The company’s revenues went from just around $300 million in 2000 to an astonishing $1.7 billion in 2011. Overall, the corrections industry is one of the soundest stock/equity bets in the world, with soaring revenues—the industry as a whole pulled in more than $5 billion in America in 2011.

  The jailing-Hispanics business is the perfect mix of politics and profit. Companies like CCA donate generously to politicians everywhere, particularly at the state level. The firm has spent as much as $3.4 million lobbying in a single year and on average spends between $1 million and $2 million a year. Its lobbyists are everywhere, and in every major anti-immigrant bill, you can usually find a current or former CCA lobbyist lurking in the weeds somewhere. Arizona governor Jan Brewer, for instance, had two ex–CCA lobbyists on her staff helping write the legislation when she pushed through her notorious 1070 law, which essentially legalized racial profiling in the cause of catching illegal immigrants.

  In Alvaro’s Georgia, Governor Nathan Deal, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle, and State Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers had all been longtime recipients of CCA contributions when they worked to pass HB 87, a profiling law very similar to Brewer’s 1070 bill.

  The result is a huge win-win for industry and the politicians they work with. A governor like Jan Brewer publicly knocks on hated immigrants and wins votes, while CCA takes home $166 a day for every immigrant caught in the law enforcement net.

  Local police forces go along because the federal government compensates them for their detention of immigrants. A program called the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) pays local police forces out of the federal kitty for any detained immigrants who meet certain criteria (they’re undocumented, they stayed for at least four days, and they’ve been convicted of at least two misdemeanors). According to the GAO, states received about $1.6 billion annually in SCAAP payments through the end of the 2000s, and the numbers are likely to rise in this decade.

  Meanwhile, local politicians go along w
ith the arrests because they can pitch the construction of new detention facilities by firms like CCA, the GEO Group, and MTC as moves that create new jobs—just look at glowing press reports like this one, from a CBS affiliate along the Alabama-Georgia border, WRBL, in late 2011:

  CCA BEGINS HIRING FOR NEW JENKINS FACILITY

  New Georgia institution brings job prospects, economic boost to local community

  There are only two losers in this daisy chain of political moves. First of course are the Hispanic immigrants, who don’t vote and are essentially without a real political lobby. The second group is their employers, and they do have a lobby, but there’s a compromise in the works for them (more on that later). Everyone else—the politicians, the company itself, the towns that see new jobs for white folks—they all win.

  And someone else wins, too: Wall Street. Some of the biggest investors in private prison companies are, you guessed it, the too-big-to-fail banks. Wells Fargo, for instance, has nearly $100 million invested in the GEO Group, plus about $6 million in CCA. Bank of America, General Electric, Fidelity, and Vanguard are all major investors in at least one of the three big prison companies.

  And why not? Like too-big-to-fail banking itself, private prisons are an industry that depends not on the unpredictable economy but upon political connections. It’s the perfect kind of business in the oligarchical capitalism age, with guaranteed profits to provide a low-cost public insurance against the vagaries of the market. Stock analysts, naturally, are not blind to the brilliance of the business formula.

  “One of the best presentations I heard discussed,” wrote an analyst from Zacks, the stock research firm, “was the corrections industry and how it was a smart and uncommon place to put your money.” CCA, the analyst went on, was

  one of the top selections for its steady growth and defensive nature of its business. Economies may ebb and flow, but the number of incarcerated Americans is steadily growing according to the U.S. Department of Justice.