October 27, 2016

Dear Future President,

Immigration has been a subject of much controversy, especially lately as we pick a candidate to lead us for the next four years. It is undeniable that immigration is an essential component that made America what it is today; Ellis Island alone had 12 million immigrants come in to build on early American soil. Today we wonder if more restrictions should be made regarding immigration and I am one to agree with this thought.

Immigration happens. But the way some people make it into the United States may not always be legal. Illegal immigrants come into America everyday, coming over hoping for sanctuary from whatever distress their country is in or causes. Some simply seek to live and breathe our popular “American dream”. Unfortunately, when this happens, undocumented people become more common and they never touch the system--by system, in this example, I mean the economy. On the economy and job market, The Atlantic created an article called, “Americas Immigration Challenge” and they write “For better or worse, producing low-wage jobs is one thing the U.S. economy can do in abundance. Where Americans have more difficulty is offering a path to upward mobility, especially for people born into the poorest one-fifth of the population. Not all migrants inhabit that bottom one-fifth. But disconcertingly many do…” This basically states that once people reach a point of poor-ness (for lack of a better word) they don’t return from it. These people don’t help in the economy, if anything they make things worse by eating up welfare and food stamps. Also from the article, “About half of all imigrant-headed households accept some form of means-tested social welfare program. Those immigrant groups that arrive with the most education are, unsuprisingly, the least likely to require government assassitance; those with the least require the most. This hurts the economy for us.

In America, the workforce and education work hand in hand, and we notice this when looking at immigrants “… about one-third of immigrants arrive with less than a high-school education. Immigrants from Latin America- the largest single group- arrive with the least education: Only about 13 percent of them have a college degree or more… For many decades to come, Latino families will lag well behind their non-Latino counterparts.” So in essence we have people not qualified to join in the worksforce for most jobs (which require a GED or higher) and the majority of our immigrants which are Latinos are not going to be quialified for a long while and may lag America as a whole according to this evidence.

Immigrants also have a hard time adapting to our socitey, also according to The Atlantic “… Even in third-geration Hispanic Americans are twice as likely to be poor as non-Latino whites… When children of immigrants grow up poor, they assimulate to the culture of poorer America. While Mexicans in Mexico are less likely to be obese than Americans, U.S. Latinos are considerabley more likely to be obese than their non-Latino counterparts.” It also states “This downward assimulation has stark real-world consequences. U.S. born Lations score lower on standardized tests and are more likely to drop out of high school than their non-Latino white counterparts.”

This makes me believe that immigration should be restricted more, with people walking in that are unbenificial to our society we may be hurting America more. Background checks should become a more in depth procedure.  We are a large mixing pot of diversity, that is what we grew on, but now its time to change; we need to focus on our problems for a bit, eveybody knows we have a long list of them. If we only let people in that benefit us and met new (and needed) regulations then that ay help us considerably. We should recognize immigration is in our roots and that maybe that is where it should stay.

Sincerely,

Grace