Dear next President,

I am a 16 year old and a student at West Albany High School. I am writing to you on the political issue of immigration. The immigration law INA regulates foreign students, manages temporary workers, and authorizes humanitarian resources such as asylums and refugee admissions. What about families with legal children?There needs to be a change. Families are being torn apart, children being separated from parents. Immigrants come to America to have a better life. Imagine a world without them.

All over the country there immigrants, legal or not, are helping to build the economy. According to the Center for American Progress, there are an estimated 11.3 million immigrants in the United States. Immigrants that are undocumented are getting paid under the table, which means that the employers don’t pay social security taxes, unemployment insurance or workers compensation. Mass deportation would cost almost $1 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years. States with the unauthorized workers will experience the largest decline in GDP. Is America willing to lose that much money?

Do you really know or even understand how immigrants impact our everyday lives? They fill the jobs that Americans who live off welfare are to lazy to do. Host countries are enriched by cultural diversity. A research study by Oxford Economics published by the Department of Employment and Learning(DEL) said that migrant labor helped maintain labour supply to fuel 2004-2008 economic boom. The migrant workers seem to make a difference between some businesses staying afloat. A survey, conducted by the Oxford Economics , of 600 businesses where 31% have said that migrants were crucial to the continuity of their business and this rose to 50%in health and social care and agriculture. We tend to just look at the headlines instead of looking into the article.

I myself have overheard pupils talk about how they are against having immigrants come into America. They are against it because we as Americans can not afford to pay our own taxes and should not have to pay for people who don't pay any at all. Immigrants come to the U.S. to live a better life. They are hard workers because they come from poverty. I have witnessed this first hand with my father. He lived in a small town called Tuxpan in the state of Nayarit, Mexico. 17 years old when he came to the U.S for the first time, wanting to have a better life for himself, he went hard to work. After my father had met my mother and had me they had settled down. Still working to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, it wasn't enough. So he got himself a second job as a dishwasher. It wasn't until I was in 6th grade that my father was deported. I had gotten the news when I came home from school that my father, the only man I had ever learned to trust, was gone. I could not understand at that age what deportation was or how it worked, all I knew was that they had taken the my father away from me. I was and still am heartbroken that I can’t come home to see my dad. This is what deportation does to a child.

In conclusion, I demand that you think twice on immigration and deportation laws. We all have an impact on this country, legal or not. I ask that you lessen the laws of immigration and deportation, and  make them pertinent to those thousands of families who have lived here their whole lives.You are tearing families apart. Again I say, imagine a world without immigrants.

Sincerely,

Kaley, child of an immigrant