Dear Next President,

The issue I am writing about is illegal immigration. The biggest problem that I want to addressed is that people should stop thinking that just because they’re immigrants, they’re bad people who commit more crime than natives.

Recently many people think that many immigrants are more likely to commit crime. But that’s not true because the data shows that Mexican born male immigrants aged between 18 to 39 without high school diplomas had lower incrimination rate in 2010 than native born males of the same age group. This is shown in different studies as the journalist Ilya Somin states in his article about immigration and crime.

This issue is important to me because if people think that they’re committing crimes, they think of them badly and want to send them back. This is unfair because if an illegal immigrant is honest and works hard, it should be giving the chance to become legal, criminals on the other hand should be punished. This can have also an effect on the country and Americans because immigrants come to our country to work and legalizing them will mean they will pay taxes and contribute on the economy.

My request for the next president is to make sure there will be laws to let the illegal immigrants to have a chance to live in our country, of course after following the legal path to become citizen, and to make sure that they will be treated fairly. Our country has always been the land of immigrants, since the colonists, settlers and pioneers. In the 1920 waves of Europeans, and later Latin Americans and Asians moved to our country, the real difference now is that most of the Mexican are illegal. Some people think that creating a legal path for low skilled mexican workers will do good for them and also for our economy as the journalist Eduardo Porter stated in his article on the NY Times. This issue is important to me because my parents immigrated from Italy and they had a chance to live in this country and I believe that other people should have the same chance.

Sincerely,

Pierluigi Di Iorio