Essay: Illegal immigrants

The United States Borders are crossed by thousands of illegal immigrants each year. Not counting the immigrants that come here legally on a Visa, and never renew them. These immigrants come to America in pursuit of the American Dream, ‘happy and free’. Willing to do whatever it takes to acclimate themselves into the American culture and infringe upon the walls of ethnic division. The highest groups of ethnicities that cause our numbers to be so high are Asians, Europeans and Latin Americans or Hispanics. A large number of the U.S citizens are against the ‘blanket amnesty’ that would ‘legalize’ a large number of illegal immigrants. Some of the things that are affected by this topic, would be economical system, crime and cultural influences.
In America, illegal immigration has caused and continues to cause, many problems economically speaking. Most people have a belief that illegal immigrants are taking away from the government supply of money, by not paying taxes. But yet they still are able to draw money from that government supply, by getting welfare, food stamps, healthcare, WIC, etc. Our schools are funded by money that the government receives from the taxes that American citizens pay. While the American citizens tax money is paying for all children, the illegal immigrants children are getting a free education. Also, government money is used to maintain our roads, water systems and jails. Meanwhile the illegal immigrants are using our roads, water systems and filling our jails. According to Eduardo Porter, ‘it is impossible to know exactly how many illegal immigrant workers pay taxes,’ specialist say that ‘ most of them do pay taxes’ (Porter, 2005) In fact since the late 1980’s, ‘the Social Security Administration received a numerous amount of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect’ sometimes fictitious Social Security numbers. These fictitious W-2 earning reports were stashed in an ‘earnings suspense file’ with the hopes that someone would one day figure out who they belonged to. In the 1990’s , there was $189 billion dollars’ worth of wages that had been documented, that was about two and a half times the amount from the 1980’s. It appears that the common misconception could be wrong, there are many that do pay taxes and do not reap the benefits, like Medicare and Social Security.
Crime is also another issue that complicates illegal immigration. There are many crimes associated with illegal immigration, including: ‘the crimes committed by illegal immigrants, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, manufacturing and selling fraudulent documents, bribing public officials, and preying on illegal immigrants’ (McDonald, 1997) Many people believe that the crime rate increases with the amount of illegal immigrants that come into America. But in reality, the more people that move into a city or town the more crime you will have, regardless of citizenship. Hillary Clinton said about illegal immigrants: ‘We need to bring the immigrants out of the shadows, give them the conditions that we expect them to meet, paying a fine for coming here illegally, trying to pay back taxes, over time , and learning English. If they had committed a crime, then they should be deported. But for everyone else there must be a path to legalization.’ (Hillary Clinton on Immigration, 2010) It would be almost impossible to find every illegal immigrant in this country and deport them back. Some countries have a strict policy on illegal immigration like not allowing them to participate in labor union activities, fines, and detainment. In the United States of America, it seems that you are actually being rewarded for immigrating illegally, instead of being punished. The punishment here is free healthcare and services, like welfare and food stamps.