THE POLICY PAPER

The Policy Paper

The Policy Paper

On September 11, 2001 hijacked planes were crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killing over 3,000 people. The nineteen terrorists involved in the hijacking and killing were allowed entry to the United States through student visas, but were not students. Illegal immigration is a sweeping controversy in this nation and it affects the economy, the job market, and national security. The estimates for the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. range widely from seven million all the way up to twenty million with the number growing larger everyday. Many of these illegal immigrants do not pay taxes, but still reap the benefits of the U.S. government and social security system. This means that the American citizen is paying higher taxes to help cover what these illegal immigrants are not. The border to the U.S. and Mexico must be strengthened and illegal immigration laws need to become stricter, while providing immigrants more opportunities to enter the U.S. legally. The current illegal immigration laws need to be changed, a temporary worker program must be established, and this change must happen immediately in order to protect not only the security of the U.S., but the economy. In this paper, we will discuss the impact of illegal immigration on the economy, the job market, and national security. For this purpose, we took two interviews - one with an office representative of the elected congress official Shilla Jackson Lee (Participant 1) and another person outside from her office (Participant 2).

Emerging Themes from Interviews

Illegal immigration hurts the U.S. in many different ways such as the effects on the economy and the job market. The first point is whether or not the immigrants help or hurt the economy. A sharp drop in American jobs lost to outsourcing in the early 2000's lead to an upheaval of low to middle class workers that believed these immigrants were breaking laws simply by their presence, and were benefiting from a system that they are not paying into. This lead to high job competition, and according to anti-immigrant groups, because these illegal immigrants will work for below minimum wage, the illegal immigrants would get many of the low paying jobs and they would lower the wages of the citizen workers that could get jobs (Participant 1).

According to the border control and anti-illegal immigration group, the American Patrol, the costs for services used by illegal immigrants are quite less than the taxes that they pay. Thus, they feel that America cannot provide high quality education, health care, and retirement security for legal and tax-paying citizens if we continue to allow entry to even more millions of unskilled and poor immigrants. (Participant 1).

"Illegal immigration also contributes to the dramatic population growth overwhelming communities across America--crowding school classrooms, consuming already limited affordable housing, and straining precious natural resources like water, energy, and forestland (Participant 1)."

Illegal immigration does not only hurt the U.S. economically, but also in the arena of national ...