Who?
An immigrant is a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary. Immigrants (legal and illegal) make up a growing portion of the US population increasing to 12.4% in 2005. Georiga had the highest growth rate among the states, but California still has the highest number of illegal immigrants. Immigration from Hispanic countries has remained constant since 1980s, but immigration from Europe, Canada, and Asia has increased.
What?
There have been many immigration policies passed in the US starting with the Immigration Act of 1990. This act increased the level of employment based immigration and allotted a higher proportion of vias to highly skilled immigrants, In 1996, the welfare reform was put into place, which disentitled most legal immigrants from food stamps, welfare and SSI. The same year as the welfare reform act that took away many rights from legal immigrants, the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed. This doubled the size of border patrol and stifferned penalities for document fraud/immigrant smuggling. Imposed sanctions on employers if hiring illegal immigrants, granted legal status to undocumented immigrants who had been in US since 1982 or had worked in agriculture. This gave nearly 3 millions immigrants citizenship. After that act nothing was really done about immigrantation until Post-September 11, 2001. Immigration regulations and enforcement have become more stringent, thousands of people have been deported and students much prove they have been accepted to a school before they can enter, due to the fact some of the 9-11 terrorists were admitted as forgein students. Also, the number of border agents weas increased and the National Guard was dispatched to the borders. Congress has also passes laws increasing border control (700 miles of fencing along the southern border of the US), but no progress has been made in passing an mmigration reform bill. Basically, the government feels increasing border control will fix the problem, but I do not agree. It has been proven that immigration from Hispanic countries has not increased so why do we keep spending money to control borders instead of taking care of the immigrants we already have??
I think increasing border control is a good start to help fix the problem of immigration and one of the only reasons it isn't working is because they find new ways to come over. It's probably more inexpensive to try to control borders than to try to take care of immigrants, not to mention the fact that they're not really our responsibility anyway since they're coming over here illegally.
ReplyDeleteI believe rather than trying to keep up with how immigrants are crossing our borders, the government should focus on why! Immigrants are coming over because employers are hiring undocumented workers left and right. These illegal immigrants are working for cheap and not being taxed and then sending the money back to their families. This is not only illegal but it is taking away jobs for our own American citizens. If we stopped the reason for them sneaking in illegally and increasing reasons for them to try to gain citizenship, that would be a great start to our illegal immigration problem.
ReplyDeleteThe border control is not only to fight illegal immigration but also the drug war...so its definitely not a waste of money to do so. As far as giving amnesty to the immigrants already here...we have already done that countless time and if we continue doing that, people will take illegal immigration for granted and not even try legal immigration. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if our big companies/corporations stop hiring illegal immigrants, we wouldn't have much of a problem with illegal immigrants coming in taking American citizens jobs away. Come on, don't we all notice illegal immigrants are willing to work at a cheaper wage compared to an American citizen who complains about minimum wage. Corporates doesn't mind giving a job to an undocumented immigrant who will work as long as the company is making PROFIT.
ReplyDelete