* The 2014-2015 senior student signature series features area senior class students – and their own “signature” outlooks on a topic of their choice. A new outlook will be posted on Cross-Counties Connect each Friday. The series opens with point of view comments by seniors from Mountain Lake Public High School. The opinions can be found by clicking on the Family & Faith link on the website’s header, and scrolling down to, and clicking on, Outlook. Their teachers are Brenda Feil, Kim Syverson and Debby Jass.
Borderline
Would you rather let a bacterium enter your body or a vitamin? In the same way you would take vitamins to strengthen your body, legal immigrants bolster our nation, but illegal immigrants have an adverse effect on our country like bacteria do to living organisms. Because of the many problems surrounding the issue of illegal immigration, America needs to reinforce its current programs and implement new ones to halt this widespread dilemma.
To start, a few conflicts arise with having illicit people within U.S. borders. An estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently live in the United States (U. S.), according to a 2008 report from the Center for Immigration Studies. Other studies gauge the number to be anywhere from 7 to 20 million illegal aliens. Why is this detrimental to our country? Illegal migrants not only take jobs from legal Americans because of their willingness to accept much lower wages, but also decrease the pay and employment of U.S. citizens. Plus, hiring undocumented workers is also illegal as of 1986 in the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Terrorists can also pass over the boundary alongside illegitimate Americans, both of whom could be carrying communicable diseases or biological hazards. This is why the border should be far more secure than it is.
Secondly, our government has passed some legislation that restricts immigration. For instance, the Anarchist Exclusion Act added anarchists, beggars, prostitutes, and importers of prostitutes to the list of undesirables from the Page Act of 1875, and the Immigration Act of 1990 capped the number of immigrants entering the union per year to 700,000. However, according to the Washington Post, 300,000 undocumented entries occur each year in the U. S.
Our government says immigration reform is needed, but they have put the issue aside to focus on frivolous issues like how much people should eat and drink. The reason for the plethora of wanderers crossing the southern border in the first place is that they believe they will receive amnesty from some lobbying minority groups and Democrats and receive all the free handouts the government gives to economically depressed people. Therefore, the less fortunate legal U. S. citizens get less payment, increasing the gap between them and the financially elite.
Fortunately, many solutions exist that may have a positive effect on the situation. I presume the most efficient way to secure our border would be to fence off the remaining unprotected swathes of land. Next would be to crack down on sham marriages—fake marriages which are used as a gateway into the United States – and expired visa users and enhance our database to single out the applicants with manufactured information on their legal immigration papers. Adjoining that would be to file out the illegal aliens from American jobs slowly and replace them with qualified residents while punishing employers by imposing fines.
In conclusion, many propositions remain to alleviate our immigration problems. Nonetheless, if we continue to ignore the predicament our country is in and continue to let our legislatures encounter gridlock and let party lines hinder progress, we will never fix the complicated dilemma of America’s unlawful entrants. This will put more and more strain on the U. S. and place people in harm’s way because of terrorists, diseases, and economic repercussions.
This country needs to wake up to the grave conundrum of illegal immigration before we regret our decisions to ignore it.