Immigration

Immigration

Introduction

Immigration has always been a major issue in the United States, a large portion of our population is made up of people who came from other countries. But it is becoming more important now with the population topping 300 million and concerns of illegal immigration becoming a hot issue. Legal immigrants are far more accepted in the country than immigrants who enter the country illegally across the borders or water barriers. But like most concerns the nation is facing, illegal immigration has both upsides and downsides to the issue.

Being a legal immigrant is a much smoother road than entering the nation illegally. Many legal immigrants enter this country to take advantage of job opportunities that are not available in their home country or to further their education at our Universities. In fact, with each new generation of recent immigrants the average education has been rising. Legal immigrants entering the U.S. with a degree past High School is increasing. This means these people are not coming to America in search of an unskilled position such as a manual laborer or minimum wage cashier, they will be filling positions higher up in companies that may be in need of someone with these types of postgraduate educations. This also implies that these people are motivated and ready to adapt to any type of occupational environment they have been educated in. These legal immigrants want to work and want to provide a better life for themselves, their family, and the next generation to come. Studies also show that the first and second generations of immigrants do better in school than their American native counterparts and get more education-related awards.(RapidImmigration.com) With all of these advantages in education that legal immigrants bring, it seems that they will do their part in furthering the growth and evolution of America and its economy.

Analysis

Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, usually do not have most of the immediately visible advantages that legal immigrants possess. Here in the U.S. we get many of our illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico to the United States or coming to our country from Cuba. An estimated 700,000 immigrants enter the United States illegally every year. Many of them are undereducated; in fact 67% of the illegal immigrant populations that enter the U.S. have less than a High School education.(Wikipedia.com) Since these immigrants are undereducated they usually end up with jobs in that involve unskilled manual labor and will work for fewer wages than Americans. This has recently brought the issue of illegal immigration to the front of many political debates.

With 12-20 million illegal aliens residing in the United States today, many politicians and lawmakers considered amnesty and employer sanctions as options to deal with the problem. Amnesty has been used in the past. The United States passed the Immigration Reform Control Act in 1986 which granted amnesty to over 2.25 million illegal immigrants employed in the U.S., along with employer sanctions and better border enforcement.(Djajic, Slobodan P. 605) Since they were employed, policy-makers at ...