Illegal immigration has been an issue that the United State has been dealing since the early 1800s. In recent years, there has been a surge in the amount of attention that illegal immigration is receiving in the media. This attention is mainly because of the massive increase of Hispanic immigrants crossing the border illegally and disobeying U.S. laws. Another contributing factor is that President Trump is aiming to build a higher border wall between the United State and Mexico border. Many illegal immigrants come to the U.S. to flee danger in their native country or to find work to better their lives. Illegal immigrants face the fear of being deported every day. In November of 2014, President Barack Obama proclaimed a program of ‘deferral action’, which allow illegal immigrants to legally stay and work in the United States.
The process of becoming a U.S. citizen is very difficult and the selection process is very severe, especially come the person come to the country illegally. In order to become a citizen, the undocumented immigrant must have a clean criminal record, learn to speak English, file federal income tax for their time in the United States, pay a penalty fine, and register with the Department of Homeland Security. If the undocumented immigrants pass all of these tests, they are granted a green card after about eight years and must wait another five years to apply for citizenship. This entire process could take up to 15 years, but it is worth it to families who fear the fate of deportation back to their dangerous native country.
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Families and individuals are willing to take huge risks in order to come to America for a better life. Immigrants are willing to wait these 15 years to become a citizen knowing that with this citizenship, their lives will be changed. I think that the media and different political debates take away from the simplicity of this issue. There are so many different cases of illegal immigrants that we begin to focus only on the bad stories and not the good. There are so many different cases and stories of illegal immigration that our society begins to resort to believing the myths that the media and other people spread instead of taking the time to understand the entire topic.
There are many different myths about illegal immigrants in our society, but the ones that seem to come up the most are that they take away potential jobs for American citizens, don’t want to learn English and U.S. customs, and don’t pay taxes. The first myth that I am going to address is the idea that immigrants have a negative impact on our economy and take away potential jobs for Americans. This is untrue in many ways. It is true that immigrants come to America in search of work, but the jobs that these immigrants are taking are low-skilled jobs that most Americans aren’t willing to do anyway. Most immigrants do not have the higher education that is needed to work most jobs in America and end up filling the jobs that involve intensive labor skills that U.S. born citizens refuse to do. Also, in 2000-2004, “there was a positive correlation between the increase in the foreign-born population and the employment of native-born workers in 27 states and the District of Columbia”, according to a study done by the Pew Hispanic Cener. This information shows that immigrants are not only helping our economy by doing jobs that U.S. citizens fail to do, but also helping native citizens find jobs and earn higher wages. This is just one example of how distorted our society’s view is of the impact of illegal immigrants on our country.
Another myth is that immigrants don’t want to learn to speak or write English or learn about our country’s customs. This in itself is a stereotype that some U.S. citizens believe is true about immigrants. In reality, this statement is very misleading. Most immigrants understand that in order to succeed in the United State, they must learn to speak English, and succeeding in the United State and becoming a contributing member of society is their first priority. There has been a drastic increase in the amount of first-generation English-speaking immigrants, and even more in second-generation immigrants. Immigrant families understand the urgency to learn English and assimilate into the U.S. culture, so they put a huge emphasis on educating their children. “The proportion of both Asian and Latino immigrants, who speak English exclusively rises from 10% in the first generation to 29% in the second and 94% in the third” (ACLU).
Another false statement that often comes up when talking about illegal immigrants is the idea that they bring crime into our cities. This stereotype has definitely affected how these immigrants are viewed in our society. U.S. citizens think that because some immigrants are low-income, uneducated people they are automatically guilty of a crime. Also, our society tries to group all immigrants together and alienate them as we have done in the past. In the media these immigrants are portrayed as a problem for our society, so we automatically associate them with danger. I think we need to step back and look at the facts before placing these awful stereotypes on immigrants. While people born abroad make up about 35% of California's adult population, they account for only about 17% of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed. This fact shows that our country’s crimes are more often coming from U.S. citizens than from immigrants, proving all stereotypes of immigrants wrong. Another statistic that proves this myth wrong is that U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, but that is not a reason to assume all immigrants are dangerous, just like we don’t assume all U.S. citizens are criminals because of the people in prison. These stereotypes can have huge, detrimental impacts on the successes of immigrants in the U.S., and I believe that we need to get rid of them in order to give immigrants a fighting chance in U.S. society.
The final, but I believe is the most popular myth, is the myth that illegal immigrants aren’t contributing to our society by not paying taxes. U.S. citizens believe that because the illegal immigrants aren’t documented they are flying under the radar and using hospital care and public schools without paying for them in taxes. To be completely honest, this myth has been so widely spread that I too believed it was true. In fact, this myth has recently been proven wrong and is actually the complete opposite. Immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes for benefits that they will never receive. According to the 2015 Economic Report of the President, more than half of all undocumented immigrants are believed to be working ‘on the books’ and contribute to the tax rolls, but are ineligible for almost all federal public assistance programs and most major federal-state programs. I used to believe that illegal immigrants didn’t pay any taxes and just lived off of the U.S. citizen taxpayers. It has also been proven that illegal immigrants make up a major percentage of the billions of dollars paid into the Social Security system. Three-quarters of undocumented immigrants who use a fake Social Security number actually pay payroll taxes, and “the suspense file is growing by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 to 7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes” (ACLU). If I had been educated with statistics like these when hearing about the surge in illegal immigration, my outlook on this political issue would have been a lot different. More U.S. citizens need to take the time to understand what illegal immigrants are actually doing for our society instead of resorting to false stereotypes.
I hope that with the illegal immigration reform bill our country will soon rid the stereotypes of all immigrants. This bill has the ability to put an end to the horrible deportation stories that illegal immigrants have been facing lately. Families are being split apart because children who are a part of illegal immigrant families that were born in America are considered American citizens. Their parents, on the other hand, are not. I understand that these deportation laws need to be followed in every circumstance, but it doesn’t seem fair to split up families because of it. Also, children that were brought over illegally and grew up in America are now being deported to countries that are considered unsafe and poverty-stricken. I am so relieved that our government is working on a bill to grant citizenship to over 11 million immigrants if it means that all of this pain will come to an end. Our country is supposedly known as a ‘melting pot’ and that we welcome all ethnicities with open arms, but our actions and stereotypes are portraying otherwise. In ‘'A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America’, Takaki stated: “The study of diversity is essential for understanding how and why America became what Walt Whitman called a ‘teeming nation of nations’”. The bill allows these undocumented immigrants to gain citizenship the loudest voices in our society, such as the media and political figures, will help to show our country everything that these new citizens have to offer. At the beginning of the term, we focused on what it is to be American, and I believe that these hard-working immigrants, either illegal or not, are portraying all of the qualities that I consider to be ‘American’.
Works Cited
- Takaki, Ronald T.A. ‘A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America’. Boston: Little, Brown &, 1993.
- ‘The Rights of Immigrants - ACLU Position Paper’. American Civil Liberties Union, http://aclu.org/other/rights-immigrants-aclu-position-paper
- ‘Myths and Facts About Immigrants and Immigration’. Anti-Defamation League, http://adl.org/resources/fact-sheets/myths-and-facts-about-immigrants-and-immigration
- Bennett, Brian. ‘Senators Agree on Path to Legal Status for Illegal Immigrants’. Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 11 Feb. 2018, http://articles.latimes.com/2018/feb/11/nation/la-na-immigration-hurdles-20130311
- Flagg, Anna. ‘The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant’. The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Mar. 2018, http://nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-immigration-myth.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=E8278CCA48B7167C939DBCA0DBB1925B&gwt=pay
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