Lisa Illinois

Immigrants Don't Have to Live in Fear

Immigrants shouldn't have to live in fear, they should have freedom to live just like all Americans. Instead of throwing them out we should be helping them make a better life and here's why.

Dear President,

          The U.S. immigrant population stood at more than 42.4 million, or 13.3 percent, of the total U.S. population of 318.9 million in 2014. Here is a story about a girl and her family who suffered the pain of her family being deported and no one was able to help her.

          She’s 16 years old, who lives in a small town and she is the daughter of an immigrant. She grew up in a small town where 96 percent of the population is white. It’s tough. She is the president of the debate club in her school, which is where they talk about current news topics. The hardest topic is when they talk about immigration; the people in her debate club say that they should deport all undocumented immigrants and make them wait in line like all the other people to get their papers… LEGALLY” She hasn’t seen her father since she was 8 years of age and the last time she saw him, he was on a train and her family was saying goodbye and they were crying. She is now 16 and hasn’t seen her dad since she was 8 years of age. Now that’s sad. Her along with her mother live in fear since. They fear that her mother would be deported and that they will be separated from each other. She says her mother is in constant fear. But I think that their family are right, people in the United States shouldn’t have to live in constant fear, they should be living in Peace and Harmony, but NEVER in FEAR! I think that we should be helping at least some of the immigrants that come to the US.

Most of the population in the United States are immigrants and I think that we should help at least some of the immigrant population, so that we at least made a difference.

          Between 2013 and 2014, the foreign-born population increased by 1 million, or 2.5 percent. Immigrants in the United States and their U.S.-born children now number approximately 81 million people, or 26 percent of the overall U.S. population.In 2014, 1.3 million foreign-born individuals moved to the United States, an 11 percent increase from 1.2 million in 2013. India was the leading country of origin for new immigrants, with 147,500 arriving in 2014, followed by China with 131,800, Mexico with 130,000, Canada with 41,200, and the Philippines with 40,500.

Throughout the years we have helped at least 1 million people since 2008, so why don’t we do the same thing we did then to help us now.

          The number of immigrants has quadrupled from 9.6 million in 1970 to 38 million in 2007. Nearly 14 million immigrants came to the United States between 2000 to 2010. Out of those 14 million immigrants, over 1 million people were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. Every country has the “per-country limit” which applies to the number of visas that the country has, So maybe in order to stay within the limit we could help the immigrants who need it most, instead of helping every single one.

People come here because they want to have a new life. They come to the U.S. because it helps make a difference in their lives, it gives them better opportunities, it also gives their children a better life here then they would have had living from where they came from.

          The United States had more immigrants come in from 1991 to 2000, they had at least 10 to 11 million than the decades before that. In those 10 million legal immigrants that came to the U.S. had a growth of about 0.3% which had the U.S. population from about 249 million to 281 million people. The highest decade in which immigrants came was 1900s, which was when 8.8 million people came to the U.S, which also increased the total population by 1% every year. 15% of Americans were foreign-born in 1970, and in 1999 only 10% of Americans were from foreign-born. In 1970 immigrants were 4.7% part of the U.S. population and it was rising again in 1980 by 6.2 percent which rose again by 12.5% by 2009.

          As of 2010, 25% of the U.S. under age 18 population were either the first or second generation immigrants. 8% of most babies born in the U.S. in 2008 were from illegal immigrant parents. The legal immigration in the United States increased from 250,000 in the 1930s to 2.5 million in the 1950s, to 4.5 million in the 1970s, and to 7.3 million in the 1980s and all of this was just be resting at about 10 million in the 1990s. The number of legal immigrants are at least 1,000,000 every year and out of those about 600,000 are already in the U.S. legal immigrants. Our highest level ever of legal immigrants was 37,000,000.

          Based on all of these facts I believe that we should help at least some of the immigrants that come to the United States. What we could do is we could help some of the immigrants that have families get their papers so, that their families could have a better life. We could make an organization that helps immigrants with their health or their insurance because is we can’t give them all their papers to become citizens we could at least make an organization to help them with their health or even childcare, we could help them with things they can’t have because they're not U.S. citizens.

Lisa

Gurrie Middle School

McGovern Period 1/2

Ms. McGovern's Period 1/2 ELA Class

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