Hey! Wag your finger in someone else's face!

She went out of her way to lock up immigrants—embracing SB 1070 during the 2010 Summer of Hate election, inventing crazy stories about headless bodies littering the desert, and waving her bony finger in President Obama's face, whining that he wasn't "securing the border."

All of this hair-on-fire Mexican bashing comes when immigration is at net-zero, maybe less, partially the result of America's shitty economy and also a consequence of Obama's border security. He's increased both the amount of funding and the number of patrols in the region, and the result is far fewer immigrants even attempting a crossing.



In pure numbers it is this: Where border agents made some 530,000 arrests in San Diego in fiscal year 1993, they had fewer than 30,000 in 2012.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's quest to imprison as many aliens as possible was steered in part by the state's powerful private prison lobby, since the "papers please" law and other tough anti-immigrant policies bring more customers to their jails. Most stories about the Department of Homeland Security releasing inmates this week have overlooked the blow to the prison industry's bottom line. It costs, for instance, about $164 a day to incarcerate one immigrant. Multiply that by tens of thousands. Day after day.

The industry has tremendous clout here. Two of Brewer's key aides were former lobbyists for Corrections Corporation of America, which donated handsomely to the ALEC darlings in the legislature who crafted and supported SB 1070. Elsewhere, when an annual study revealed that Arizona's private prisons are more costly and less effectual than the public variety, the industry's GOP bootlickers simply introduced a bill to eliminate the annual study. It passed, problem solved. Now prisons may lose more clients if DHS continues to release immigrant inmates, and we can't have that!

Follow me below the fold to see what's really appalling about all this.