Investors really should care about immigration. Do you?

Why for-profit immigration detention facilities need to be excluded from socially responsible portfolios If you’re anything like me, you’ve watched with heartbreak the countless images flooding the news these days of asylum seekers in cages and children separated from their parents. You may have also wondered what you can do, short of heading to the border to volunteer for a legal aid organization. If you have money invested in the stock market — perhaps in a retirement account — one thing you can do is make sure your dollars aren’t supporting the for-profit prisons that hold detained immigrants. About 70 percent of immigrant detainees are held in facilities owned by for-profit companies, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center. The two largest for-profit prison contractors in the United States are GEO Group and CoreCivic. They’re also the only ones that are publicly traded companies. Together, they imprison thousands of immigrant detainees across the country. According to Bloomberg, GEO Group is the larger of the two, running 11 immigrant processing centers around the country and one family residential center under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). CoreCivic runs eight, including a facility for families in Dilley, Texas. In June,