Immigration Policy
The immigration policy in this country is awful. In part, it can be held accountable for allowing the terrorists in before 9/11. Just as important, I believe it's a major cause of poverty in the United States. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in January 2000, there were 7 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. California houses 32% of that 7 million and Mexico is the largest source of illegal immigrants with 2.0 million in 1990 increasing to 4.8 million in January 2000. Mexico's population of unauthorized immigrants increased from 58% in 1990 to 69% in 2000. That an increase of a little over 1% a year over ten years. It doesn't seem like a lot on paper, but it's an incredible amount in actuality. And more urgent is the realization that it's been a steady increase! With illegal aliens in this country the manual labor workforce, i.e. carpenters, painters, etc., are forced to compete for the same jobs with very different salary requirements for their workers. A business owner can pay an illegal alien less than minimum wage. This means that they can make a lower bid for a job because they don't have to pay their salaried workers as much as an owner who hires citizens. This hurts the business owner who, under any other circumstances, would want to hire a legal citizen, but can't because he would go out of business.Now, think of all the people in this country, who are legally allowed to be here, who don't have jobs who could work for these businesses if the number of illegal aliens were lower. Our immigration policy hinders these people from getting jobs, which effects the rate of poverty and unemployment. The bottom line should be that every foreigner in this country should have to go through the same process in order to work here, get a driver's license, insurance, welfare, and whatever else illegal aliens are getting now. Not only isn't it fair to the people who were born here who need jobs, but it's unfair to the foreigners who go through the legal process to become citizens. The borders have to be tightened, the penalty for being in this country illegally should more severe. Right now the law regarding unauthorized immigrants isn't inforced, most people probably think it doesn't exist. This is a disservice to the citizens of the United States.
House Speaker J. Dennis Hassert has said that his chamber will be putting together an Immigration bill this year. President Bush has been pushing for a bill of this kind for some time now, however, his close ties to Vincente Fox, President of Mexico, has clouded his judgement here. If President Fox had his way there would be open borders between the U.S. and Mexico. His people come here to make money and then send it back to Mexico, which has helped their economy considerably. Fox has said that Mexicans in the United States sent home $12 billion in 2003. Now that a bill is being put together, the House and Congress have to make sure that this bill targets the seriousness of the problems with our current immigration policy and takes an active step to righting them.
posted by Snowbird @ 10:21 AM
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