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Immigration crackdown fills prisons with Latinos, reinforces racism

October 28, 2011 (1 min read)

"Hispanics are now the majority group being sent to federal prison, largely because of the criminal prosecution of repeat border jumpers. ... the line has been blurred between the broader Hispanic population and outright lawbreakers – the result being the growing persecution of all Hispanic-looking people. ... "The discourse right now is that all Latinos are immigrants, and if they're all immigrants, then there's the suspicion that they're all illegal, which means they're criminals," says Allert Brown-Gort, associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. "And if they're criminals, the thinking goes, that means we don't want them here." ... Even those here legally feel unwelcome.  That's true for Lulu Alvarez, a legal Mexican immigrant who works at a poultry plant. Suddenly, she says, people here "think all Hispanics are the same, and they treat everybody the same way, as though we're all in the country illegally."" - CSM, Oct. 28, 2011.