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By Aubrey Pringle

What if immigration reform advocates used financial arguments to make their case? Ask 10 individuals how they feel about the immigration debate, and you’ll get a range of responses combining humanitarian, employment, population, or economic concerns. You probably won’t hear about the hefty price tag of the immigration control battle, nor the profits that private prisons are making off the government’s expenditures, nor the alternatives to detention that might pair more humane treatment with cost effectiveness.

Since 2003, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created and government crackdowns on undocumented aliens increased, private prisons have gained business, with industry profits more than doubling.

The prisons’ gain is the government’s loss – the profits are being generated from spending on immigration detention, which has also doubled over the past eight years. The National Immigration Forum reported earlier this month that the cost of detaining an immigrant averages $159 a day.

“There are alternatives to detention that are much less costly,” said Andrea Black, executive director of Detention Watch Network, an immigration advocacy group. “It can cost $12 a day in an alternative detention program.”

Immigrant advocates are battling private prison interests by pushing for wider use of these other options. The question is whether those alternatives will be adopted. The government now spends more than $2 billion a year on immigration detention, while spending only $72 million on alternatives to detention.

“Between 2007 and 2009, when earnings for the S&P dropped by 28 percent, ours grew by 18 percent,” said Damon Hininger, CEO of Corrections Corporation of America, during a conference call with investors in May 2010.

So far this year, CCA has spent nearly $1 million on lobbying, according to government disclosure records. The company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and is worth $4 billion. Private prisons say their lobbying efforts are aimed at promoting their services, not shaping immigration policy.

Read More The Winners in Immigration Control: Private Prisons – Aubrey Pringle – The Atlantic.