Dear Mr. or Mrs. President,

You can’t count every person in the 11.4 million who break the immigration laws. There are too many cases. Too many stories. There are too many stories to listen to for you to judge everyone who wants to come into the States. We are needlessly supporting those eleven million people by giving them access to our jobs and public accommodations. They have a much easier job in evading the collection of taxes, as we do not have documents on them that would give us a hold on them. Approximately $125 billion are being given to illegal immigrants through food stamps, education, and the cost to build the buildings made to accommodate them. However, many of them are hardworking, law-abiding (besides the immigration laws), supporters of a family too big. They are in need of our help and are a critical part of our workforce. How do we work with this massive number of working immigrants, make them feel welcome, but keep ahold of them without violating basic human rights?

We cannot say “Deport everyone from _____.” The only reason we consider this solution is because we are scared of a certain percentage that we believe is from that ethnicity, that religion, or that language. We cannot associate Germans with Hitler, Mexicans with Joaquín Guzmán, or Islamists with Al-Qaeda. If someone gave you a bowl of skittles and told you that while 95% of them would promote your body health, but 5% would kill you, how would you react? Ignore the bowl? Throw them all out? This is similar to our immigration problem. However, if we were to just throw them all out, it would cause such an economic disaster that we would spend several years finding out how to get us back into a functioning country. We also have to be careful of this delicate balance that we need to keep between a functioning economy and stable connections with other countries. If we specifically target the Skittles and only tighten the background checks for them, we would be ignoring the fact that violence and crime also comes from other places.

Our founding fathers set the cornerstones on which our nation was built. They wrote documents that we follow two hundred and forty years later. We still follow the amendments that they set in place. We use them as debate topics "How will you respect the people's right to the Second Amendment?" We use them as indisputable truths, that these are unchangeable rights that we will grant to all citizens. In the Declaration of Independence, they stated that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." They had no bias towards those who lived south of them or any solid knowledge of those who lived in Asia. They thought of all people who came to their new-found-land as free Americans. That those who came were to be sheltered and granted the same three unalienable rights; The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We make laws around these rights, make sure that anyone who oppresses another human is punished, and spend $600 billion on a military to ensure that these rights are not threatened by another nation.

Why do we look with eyes clouded while we decline the entrance of hundreds of millions of immigrants, all because of a hundred or so who gave their country a bad name? How confidently can you say that the average illegal immigrant is more prone to breaking the peace within America than someone who's family lines all the way back to the Mayflower? Americans smuggle drugs. Americans own and shoot guns unnecessarily. Why is it that as long as they have a passport, the majority of them are allowed to move to Italy, China, or South America? Those countries welcome us because they don't want to start a feud with such a powerful, rich, and important nation as the US. They don't really have the option to say no, as the United States is such a connected country at the moment. If any other country decided to cut off their connections and trading with America, they would lose quite a lot of money. We aren't incredibly reliant on any one country, and if we did say something bad enough to make another nation turn against us, we would be able to crush them easily in a war. 

A big concern for many Americans is that by having these undocumented people coming in and working for less than current low-wage workers means that the unemployment rate would increase. They believe that there aren't immigrants who take the most difficult jobs, that they don't have a good enough skill set to manage jobs that we need to be filled. Many of the undocumented immigrants came by perfectly legal means, and simply overstayed their visas. The way it works is that people from, let say Mexico, come and work for a year or two, then bring their money back to their family. If we make it harder to get over the border, they realize that they might not be able to back to the US if they need to, and decide to keep making money in America until they see a better chance to go and come back. This is a problem that if we don't pay attention to, ends up meaning that there are eleven million people we don't have documents on. If we give them documentation and get them to pay taxes, they can attend a wider range of higher-end schools that check for things like that. Higher-end schools mean that these children of immigrants are more educated, and can have a wider range of opportunity when they start looking for jobs.

We are faced with a choice. Follow the American Dream summed up in the State of Liberty "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Or we can isolate ourselves, limit our understanding of one another, and break one of the most prominent cornerstones on which America, the Land of the Free, was built.

Sincerely,

Kenzo