Immigration

Immigration Blog

            Most of think that we know everything there is to know about immigration.  We also have our minds made up about how we feel about the problems with the numbers of our illegal immigrants.  What most people don’t have is the cultural background on how our immigration population became so large.  According to our text book our most recent immigrants are called New Immigrants.  New immigrants refers to people who have migrated to the United States  after 1960.  Most of these individuals are refugee’s, indigent, and desperate. Miller, the author of our text book indicates that three trends characterize the new immigrant: Globalization, Acceleration, and feminism.  In 1965 ammendments to the Naturalization Act made it possible for many more immigrants to enter the U.S.  The amendments allowed people with specific skills to enter the country and our workforce.  Later the family reunification clause allowed residents and citizens to bring immediate family members to the United States.  This caused an overflow of immigrants into the population.  Although this group of immigrants caused a shift economically and in the job markets it is not the legal immigrants that we are constantly hearing about. (Miller, 2010)

You cannot open a newspaper, listen to talk radio, or watch the news on television without hearing about illegal immigrants.  If many of the immigrants that enter the country legally are refugees why aren’t the immigrants that cross the Rio Grande prepared to enter legally.  I think that the answer to this question has to do with quotas the government imposes on certain people, with certain occupations, from certain countries.  I can understand that economically an unskilled laborer will not benefit our country as much as an educated immigrant in the medical field would but I can’t help but remember that our country was colonized by people who had been in prison, persecuted for their religious beliefs, or could not pay their debts.  Somehow we survived and developed a political and economical system that grew to be amazing in the process.  Instead of just mere survival our ancestors thrived.  I understand that we are in difficult times.  I realize that we are facing a financial crisis but I am not sure that our present handling of our illegal immigrants will solve our economic problems.

I would like to concentrate on the Mexican immigrants that enter the country by crossing the Rio Grande.  When I think about these individuals I think about how desperate their lives must be that they would attempt to cross a river that is guarded by the police.  These individuals risk incarceration, physical brutality, rape, even death to cross into the United States.  Those who have the resolve and strength to make it into the country may walk hundreds of miles to find work in the fields harvesting crops.  The pay is of course below minimum wage.  Many people are outraged by these illegal immigrants they scream that they are taking American jobs.  I wonder how many Americans would consider accepting the jobs that the illegal immigrants have taken.  I would guess that most Americans would not even consider working under the same conditions that our Mexican brothers and sisters are willing to accept.  We out source jobs in financially distressed countries all over the world.  If we can do this do we have the rights to complain about illegal immigrants taking jobs from Americans inside the country that most American not only do not want but would never work?

We hear Americans lamenting the death of a loved one at the hands of an illegal immigrant.  The pain is very real to these families and I sympathize but how many Americans kill American each year.  Does that mean that all Americans are murderers?

These are a few arguments that we hear voiced against the illegal Mexican immigrants.  What I see are people who have taken tremendous risks to support themselves and their families.  I see hard working individuals who are willing to work under less than optimal conditions.  I also notice that we as Americans villianize and criminalize these individuals whose real crime is wanting a better life.

The illegal immigrants that are caught in our country are put into federal prisons until they can be deported.  The process is not a short one and they are not isolated.  Illegal immigrants are incarcerated with rapists, murderers, and arsonists.  Many of these people are women who have never committed a crime other than illegally entering the country.  If these women have children who were born in the United Sates the mothers are deported while their children stay in the country.

          To me there is something Un-American about the way that we have treated       Mexican illegal immigrants. The Statue of Liberty has an inscription on it written by Emily Lazarus.  The inscription reads:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

If we continue to treat illegal immigrants the way that we do we may have to delete the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

Work Cited

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2014097534_apusillegalimmigration.html

http://www.urban.org/health_policy/url.cfm?ID=1000587  Reem Saad (May 2006). "Egyptian Workers in Paris:, Pilot Ethnography". SRC, American University in Cairo.

The undocumented Africans "of St. Ambroise" Bok.net. Retrieved on 2007-10-03.

Mark Taylor. "The Drivers of Immigration in Contemporary Society: Unequal Distribution of Resources and Opportunities". Human Ecology. 35(6), December, 2007. Available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/3194641502768341/. Accessed December 10, 2009 http://www.cis.org/Kephart/Cecilia-Munoz-Embraces-Amnesty