By Gerardo Reyes, Univision Investiga Conservative journalist Ann Coulter enjoyed each and every word she used to describe the satisfaction she would derive from watching undocumented people running along the U.S.-Mexico border in response to the threat of a drone that is pursuing them. “I like the idea of the Great Wall of Trump,” commented Coulter in August of last year during the presentation by Republican candidate Donald Trump during a tour through Iowa. “I want to have a two drink minimum. Make it a big world-wide tourist attraction, and every day, live drone shows whenever anyone tries to cross the border,” she added. This contemporary version of the Roman circus is but a sample of the relatively unknown turn being taken by the electoral rhetoric in the United States, based on what many would agree in identifying as the strategy of fear. “I believe Mr. Trump is a spokesman for the discourse of fear. I believe he is a perfect example of how to instill fear in a community with some purpose that isn’t clearly visible for the population as a whole,” stated psychologist María Basualdo who works with agricultural immigrants in south Florida. The rhetoric has been shown to be very effective in matters of politics and business. Trump has forced the rest of the Republican candidates to harden their anti-immigrant discourse, which is being reflected in greater contributions and more campaign followers. But fear mongering has also multiplied the earnings of an entire industry that profits from immigration control: companies providing protective services and border security, private detention centers, providers of bail bonds, as well...
Marvin Corado believed he would be happy once he was free. “As we were before,” He said on the eve of being released from detention at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida in 2012. “A family that none of these obstacles could separate.” The obstacles mentioned by Corado were related to the ordeal that he, his wife, and daughter lived since they arrived to the U.S. looking for a job and stability, 16 years ago. The Corado family never saw their dream come to fruition. “The husband who left my house one day to go to work did not return (…). I don’t know, I don’t know what has happened, but my life hasn’t been the same since he had to enter the immigration facility, unfortunately,” said his wife Leslie. For three and a half years the team from Univision Investiga followed the footsteps of this 32-year-old immigrant from Guatemala in an attempt to understand the breadth of the legal and illegal deals that have hovered around his drama, starting from the day his father mortgaged their house to pay the human trafficker that brought him to the United States, and ending with the final payment to an immigration lawyer in Miami. Marvin’s stay at this detention center for immigrants meant that on average revenues upwards of 20,000 dollars went to GEO Group, the company that owns that center. During the year that Marvin was detained GEO Group received an average of 166 dollars per detainee every night a figure that today has gone up to 193 dollars. “Immigration is a very lucrative business for investors, stockholders...
In March of 2015, Donald Trump wrote to his more than 4.5 million Twitter followers: “Because of Rodolfo Rosas Moya, who owes me lots of money, Mexico will never again host the Miss Universe Pageant.” This message may hold the key to the disdain Trump has shown toward the Mexican people. The story behind the Tweet is a complicated lawsuit between the Miss Universe Organization, where Trump was the majority stockholder, and several Mexican entrepreneurs. Rodolfo Rosas Moya, the person that was fully identified and attacked in Trump’s Tweet, is an urban development engineer in a prosperous tourist area on Mexico’s Caribbean, known as the Riviera Maya. Rosas, age 60, was part of a group of area investors who were successful in having the Miss Universe Pageant choose Cancún in 2007 as one of the venues for the beauty contest in Mexico. These investors believed the contest would help to project to the world once again the area’s tourism image, which had suffered noticeably as a result of the pounding it had received from Hurricane Wilma the year before. The Miss Universe Organization signed a contract calling for Grupo Promotor MU México to act as host and a contract with Mexican entrepreneur Pedro Rodríguez and with the firm Comercializadora Ronac for guaranteeing sponsorships. Rosas is a Ronac stockholder. The Mexicans agreed to secure sponsorships for the contest from the municipal governments of Mexico City and Cancún, and from the state of Chiapas. They also assumed responsibility for organizing the management of the event, which is viewed by a television audience of more than one billion. The three city and...
Mexico’s border with the United States is the most visible symbol in the war against illegal immigration. Radical and moderate politicians in the Republican Party, and some Democrats, agree that the area needs to be fortified despite the fact that the number of undocumented individuals crossing the border has diminished. They do differ as to the magnitude of the project. The most ambitious proposal, advocated by Donald Trump, consists of building a concrete wall along a distance of almost 2,000 miles. In any case, the border is once again a business opportunity for security and defense companies. In addition to the physical barriers already installed, the federal government is betting on a technology that already failed. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security saw it necessary to cancel the SBInet Program, a virtual border surveillance project that had been assigned to the Boeing Company. Up to that moment it had cost $1.1 billion and covered only 53 miles in the state of Arizona. “The technology they used did not work at all. Because it was in the desert and the sand was a problem for the cameras. When there was a wind, the cameras wouldn’t work. Nor could they distinguish between immigrants and animals crossing the desert,” explained Marc Rosenblum, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. A report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of the U.S. Congress, detected 1,300 defects in the equipment. Among these defects it cited failed tests and systematic shortcomings. The virtual wall has been put up again. The government awarded a contract for the acquisition of an integrated fixed tower to...
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in the United States is one of the most influential anti-immigrant organizations in Washington. FAIR advocates a radical reform and other measures that seek the deportation of the greatest possible number of undocumented individuals, a reduction in the maximum amount of legal immigration permitted, and a strengthening of the borders. The organization prides itself in reporting it has more than 250,000 members and followers, conservatives as well as liberals, and that its members have testified before the Congress of the United States. At its offices, reports are prepared dealing with the subject, and lobbying strategies are devised. According to its website, FAIR spent 160,449 dollars in lobbying in 2014. As contributions to victories by the anti-immigrant movement, FAIR cites the defeat of immigration reform in Congress and the passing of initiatives in Arizona and Alabama. Other organizations have criticized FAIR for its ties to figures that promote theories of white race supremacy. Among these organizations one finds the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a foundation that monitors hate groups. SPLC maintains that John Tanton, who founded FAIR and was on the institution’s board of directors up until 2011, has made statements that reflect a suspicious affinity to the ideologies of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Holocaust deniers. “We know what lies behind this. We know the roots of these ideas. We know they’re connected to groups that have been founded by people that support the Nazi régime,” Tania Galloni, director of the SPLC in Florida, told Univision. “We don’t believe in any organization that tries to censor...
