Don Goldwater raised the ire of Republican candidate John McCain last week by suggesting that illegal immigrants should be imprisoned and have to help build a wall to stop Mexico from mass exportation of its poor and criminal citizens.
Goldwater is champing for a term as Governor of Arizona. He correctly asserts that foreigners who intentionally go out of their way to violate immigration laws have committed crimes, should be incarcerated for a period of time, and have to work to pay the costs of their incarceration.
Goldwater cites “tried and tested, effective and accepted practices†dealing with convicted non-violent felons in the penal system.
McCain, a leading Republicrat who confidently expects a presidential nomination from whatever party would have him, feels it is “deeply offensive†to do this to criminals, but only if they are from Mexico.
McCain is a decade too late opposing this notion. He supported forced labor camps when he voted for passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996. We have been doing this since 1996 to divorced fathers, who for no reason of their own fall behind on child support, and find their way into permanent peonage working for state prison labor camps.
Prisoners make license plates, handle airline reservations, make military tents and garb, and just about anything else the state can think of at the bargain wage of only 25-cents per hour, under the auspices of Correctional Systems, Inc (CSI), which is America’s largest private prison contractor.
If one is really a criminal, this is a good idea as long as government isn’t competing unfairly with private businesses (which it does). But, if one happens to be a divorced father who is merely unable to earn what some bureaucrat imagines he should, PROWA is an unconstitutional form of eternal slavery.
As if supporting slavery is not bad enough, McCain co-sponsored S.1227 in 1999, in an attempt to amend PROWA to give free Medicaid and SCHIP to illegal immigrant women and children. McCain’s net idea: lock up thousands of innocent divorced men, who labor for 25-cents per hour, to pay for free medical care for illegal immigrants. How dare we do this to good American citizens who have done nothing wrong and committed no crime!
Courts in most states hold that child support cannot be lowered simply because a man’s income has decreased. In most states, a man must be permanently and seriously disabled before courts will consider lowering child support orders. A 1999 study by the American Coalition for Fathers and Children found that less the 5% of those who filed for a downward modification of support in the State of California were able to get a modification. The rest were ordered to pull money out of thin air or go to prison.
Once a divorced man who falls behind on support enters the prison system, he is caught in a permanent trap. Courts consistently rule that imprisonment is not cause for lowering child support. There is no way that a man can pay off any child support order when being paid only twenty-five cents per hour.
Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Goldwater have some serious thinking to do about their political futures. Feminist politics supporting the predatory “see no evil†welfare state are falling apart. Political candidates supporting Leninist-style labor camps full of divorced men who have committed no crime will lose many disaffected voters who know exactly what is going on.
In-balance, there is nothing wrong with expecting real criminals to work to cover the costs of their incarceration – especially where this would clearly stop illegal immigration.
But balance cannot exist until federal legislation is reformed to require that state child support orders match actual monthly income. We cannot permit federal funds to continue being misused by states to create profitable penury in the name of radical feminism.
Anti-family politics of the 1990’s is dead. Pro-marriage reforms are what both leading Republican pundits and all but the most ignorant voters demand and expect from candidates in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.
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David R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network, and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition
