Controlling Immigration To The U.S. Essay, Research Paper

“Remember, remember always, that all of us? are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt

America’s constant growth in population is due to immigrants who leave their countries in search for a better life. Now America is cutting back on who they allow citizenship to. One way the government is resolving this conflict is, by creating the U.S. Border Patrol who catches illegal aliens crossing the borders. They send the aliens back to their countries, and then wait for them to try and enter again. This method isn’t very productive though. The illegal aliens find other ways to enter the country, and begin working to gain wages for their families. But is it so bad for immigrants to immigrate here? After all, every citizen of this great nation was or is related to an immigrant.

It’s estimated that 3.5 million illegal aliens are living in the U.S. right now. This means the government has no idea where, or who these people are. They can be terrorists, freeloaders, or criminals, but they can also be business men, inventors, and good citizens. But, because of September 11th’s tragedies, the government is being more strict. The U.S. government is spending more money to stop immigrants at the border. Also, If the United States stopped the immigrants from entering in the country, the economy would still have people without jobs. So its not important for these people to be in the country. In Mexico, 60 percent of its labor force is unemployed, so a lot of the Mexican people think that there are jobs for them in the U.S., but there’s not.

In the first 4 months of 1988, 400,000 illegal aliens were caught trying to cross the border. But remarkably, 300,000 slipped through without being caught. That means that over 40 percent of the people that try to get into this country illegally, succeeded. If we get more agents on guard by our borders we could cut that number to a tolerable level.

Some immigrants that come to this country legally that have a good education and can work well are not a problem. The problem is that there aren’t very many of these kinds of people that are trying to get into this country. Many immigrants are poor and just want jobs to keep themselves alive or to support their family.

It is hard for illegal immigrants who can’t prove that they are legal workers to find jobs. Some employers know from the start that the person they hired is illegal and just hire them because they will work for minimum wage or even less. To try to get voluntary compliance to not hire illegals, the INS contacted 800,000 employers and gave warnings to only 2,200 of these employers. Then out of the 800,000 employers who got contacted, the INS only fined 100 businesses. Only one question comes to mind when you think about these numbers, why didn’t the other thousands of people get fined. Since it is hard for poor legal immigrants to get jobs, they sometimes have to take hard, long, gardening type of jobs. A lot of immigrants will do just about anything so they can eat and there family won’t starve.

Sometimes illegal aliens get fake I.D.s and the employer never knows they aren’t allowed to work. The Center for U.S.-Mexican studies at the University of California in San Diego says that a quarter of illegal workers have purchased fake I.D.s.

The main problem that let’s all of these immigrants come to this country everyday is that we aren’t doing much to stop them. But there is also another reason that these people come to this country. Other countries are letting tens of thousands of people out of there country and most of these people are coming over to the U.S. Moscow’s emigration policy lets out 50,000 people a year. Over the last seven years 100,000 Irish natives have come over here on tourist visas and stayed after the time was up. Even though this is a problem that these countries let out so many people a year, the U.S. should still just say no when they arrive. As Mayor Bill Card says, ” We have not been able to get the cooperation and attention of the Federal Government” (Lamar 15)

When all of these immigrants come over to this country in search of jobs and can’t find any, sometimes they turn to crime. Deportable illegal aliens make up 26 percent of all inmates in Federal prisons. 1 out of 4 illegal immigrants are in our prisons and we have to pay for their stay there. If we get more security and never let these people get into the country, it would save the government a bundle because they wouldn’t have to pay to keep building more prisons. The World Trade Center bombing just a couple of years ago had immigrants linked in some way. This terrible incident would have never happened if they were told to go back where they came from.

There has been argument though on how to get people to go back home. “We [the U.S.] have no population policy” (Lamar 14) as a state department official commented. These are the things America is going to have to work on over in Washington. The country would be a lot better off if no one was allowed in. Though it is probably not possible to stop all illegal immigrants to come, we can lower the number tremendously. Crime, the economy, and unemployment would all benefit from keeping everyone out. ” In some fashion we’ve got to ignore the promise of the Statue of Liberty,” Congressman Romano Mozzoli says. ” The U.S.’s moral responsibility to accept immigrants is not unlimited” (Lamar 15).