The other side of the Arguement

                I noticed that many of you feel like I have only been showing one side of the argument, so I thought I would bring you the other side’s point of view more thoroughly.  If you have read my blog you have noticed I take a more conservative view on the matter, but I want to stress that I do not believe in every aspect of the conservative perspective.  The more liberal side has a very different outlook on this situation.  This side wants to focus more on providing amnesty to those immigrants who are not “documented”.  This would allow immigrants who came into this country illegally to receive the rights granted to every U.S. citizen.  They don’t feel that arresting and deporting a mass of people is fair and cost efficient.  I do agree with this.  Mass deportation would cost the U.S. billions of dollars, which is not something the government needs to be doing with spending already out of control.

            The liberal side believes that illegal immigrants should be entitled to educational and health benefits, just like American citizens receive.  They want to incorporate these people into our society and care for them.  Yes this would require taxpayer’s money to support these people until they were able to care for themselves, but you have to look at it from the view that you are helping those who might have come from a far worst situation back home.

            I am not saying that I necessarily agree with this perspective, but I feel that it is a bit more information on the liberal point of view. 

Theory Post

                When it comes to illegal immigration the two political sides are clear across the map from one another.  The conservative side wants to first secure the border and then worry about getting rid of the illegal immigrants in the country.  The liberal side wants to do more to help the illegal immigrants in the country, such as provide amnesty for those who have been in the country for a certain amount of years.   The only way for there to be a compromise to this situation I believe would for the government to reinforce the border but provide amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the country.  This would help satisfy both sides because both get their primary concerns taken care of.  The likeliness of this happening is very slim just because the cost to support the illegal immigrants granted amnesty along with reinforcing the border would be too great.  We would have to pick one area of focus to begin at and that is why little has been done to resolve the problem.  Something that would also greatly help the efforts in restricting illegal immigration would be to make obtaining a green card easier.  I know that many people can not acquire a green card and therefore choose to enter the country illegally.  It would be helpful to both sides if laws were passed that allowed acquiring a green card easier for immigrants.   

                Unfortunately this is a problem that I don’t see being resolved any time soon.  The two political sides are so far apart on their views for solutions that nothing is getting accomplished at the moment.  Compromises are going to have to be made at some point before this problem gets more out of hand than it already is.

History of Illegal Immigration

To fully understand the issue that America is facing right now I feel that it is important to look at the history of illegal immigration into this country.  Illegal immigration dates back to the late nineteenth century when the U.S. banned convicts and prostitutes from entering the country.  This then lead to the banning of Chinese immigrants and the mentally ill from entering.  Ellis Island became the main immigration station.  Here they processed most of the immigrants seeking refuge in America.  By the time Ellis Island was shut down in 1954, it had processed over 12 million immigrants.  The part I want to talk about is the history of Mexican illegal immigration into this country.  Mexican immigration into this country started in the 1920’s.  Many employers desired these immigrants for cheap labor, just like in today’s world.  The government at this time was focused more on maintaining the immigration procedures for immigrants coming from Europe and overseas, allowing Mexican immigrants to pour into the country.  When the Great Depression hit there was a severe decrease in immigrants from Mexico, approximately 500,000 to 100,000 immigrants left the country.  This was a combination of deportation and the severe drop in employment opportunities. 

            To help fight against the growing increase in immigration the U.S. established the border patrol sector of El Paso in 1924.  These men and women were responsible for protecting the Texas-Mexican border.  As many know today this organization is still in existence and is the main line of defense against illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border.

            In 1942 the U.S. signed the Bracero Treaty, which allowed for Mexican immigrants to come over and help with the increase for the demand of labor due to the war in Europe and Japan.  This not only brought legal immigrant workers to America, but also brought many illegal ones too.  These immigrants were only supposed to be hired if there were not enough American workers but employers preferred the cheap work of the immigrants instead.

            In 1954 “Operation Wetback” was launched under president Eisenhower which cause illegal immigration to drop by 95% by the end of the 1950’s.  This would not last however after the Immigration Act of 1965, which allowed for an increase in legal immigration, which cause an increase in illegal immigration as well.  Ever since then there has always been a large number of illegal immigrants in our country and if we do not do something about it, it will only get worse.

            For a more detailed history on illegal immigration you can visit this site.

Analysis Blog

To fully understand the issue that America is facing right now I feel that it is important to look at the history of illegal immigration into this country.  In the article you can see that illegal immigration dates back to the late nineteenth century when the U.S. banned convicts and prostitutes from entering the country.  This then lead to the banning of Chinese immigrants and the mentally ill from entering.  Ellis Island became the main immigration station.  Here they processed most of the immigrants seeking refuge in America.  By the time Ellis Island was shut down in 1954, it had processed over 12 million immigrants.  The part I want to talk about is the history of Mexican illegal immigration into this country.  Mexican immigration into this country started in the 1920’s.  Many employers desired these immigrants for cheap labor, just like in today’s world.  The government at this time was focused more on maintaining the immigration procedures for immigrants coming from Europe and overseas, allowing Mexican immigrants to pour into the country.  When the Great Depression hit there was a severe decrease in immigrants from Mexico, approximately 500,000 to 100,000 immigrants left the country.  This was a combination of deportation and the severe drop in employment opportunities. 

            To help fight against the growing increase in immigration the U.S. established the border patrol sector of El Paso in 1924.  These men and women were responsible for protecting the Texas-Mexican border.  As many know today this organization is still in existence and is the main line of defense against illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border.

            In 1942 the U.S. signed the Bracero Treaty, which allowed for Mexican immigrants to come over and help with the increase for the demand of labor due to the war in Europe and Japan.  This not only brought legal immigrant workers to America, but also brought many illegal ones too.  These immigrants were only supposed to be hired if there were not enough American workers but employers preferred the cheap work of the immigrants instead.

            In 1954 “Operation Wetback” was launched under president Eisenhower which cause illegal immigration to drop by 95% by the end of the 1950’s.  This would not last however after the Immigration Act of 1965, which allowed for an increase in legal immigration, which cause an increase in illegal immigration as well.  Ever since then there has always been a large number of illegal immigrants in our country and if we do not do something about it, it will only get worse.

                Now that you have seen a brief history of some of the immigration problems America has had to deal with I would like to focus now on the problems we are facing in the present time.  There are a lot of different views on my topic of illegal immigration.  With the upcoming elections I just feel that a major issue for discussion is what needs to be done about this increasing problem.  My view on the situation is the government needs to do more on the prevention of illegal immigration into this country.  I am focusing my discussion primarily on the illegal immigration across the south western border of Texas and Mexico.  This is not where all illegal immigrants come from, but it is where majority cross into the U.S.  The percentage of illegal immigrants from Mexico has grown from 51% in 2001 to 60% in 2009 as shown in the article.  One cause for this increase is because there has been a decrease in illegal immigration from other countries due to the economic downturn that America is struggling through right now.  This is a reason why I feel that we need to focus our efforts on the Texas-Mexican border.  Not only do these people come into our country illegally, but some of the time they bring crime with them. This article shows how illegal immigrants tend to be repeat offenders and cause many problems for law enforcement here in America.  I feel that background checks are necessary for all convicted criminals in today’s world.  There is no reason for an illegal immigrant to be a repeat offender, if they are arrested a background check should be performed and if they are found to be illegal then they should be deported immediately.  This would help with the overcrowding of the jails in America.  In Arizona illegal immigrants represent about 14.8 percent of the state prisoners, seen at.  The places being hit hardest by illegal immigration are the border countries Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.  This is obviously because these are the states that immigrants cross over into.  These states governments have started to take it upon themselves to solve the increasing immigrant problems in their state.  Arizona has recently enacted a new law, which allows them to run background checks on everyone that comes through their legal system.  The federal government has not done a very good job with regulating the illegal immigration ever since President Bush took office.  Since 2000 when he took office there has been an estimated 850,000 illegal immigrants entering the U.S. each year as shown in this article.

            Not only do these people come here illegally but they also bring illegal drugs into our country as well.  This is why I feel that securing the border should be a priority for the government.  If we could limit the amount of drugs entering the country is would be huge. Right now there are some very different political positions on what to do with this problem.  Now I personally lean toward the conservative views on the subject.  I feel that the government needs to do more in the regulation of immigration.  There should not be amnesty given to illegal immigrants who have stayed here a certain number of years nor should babies born here by illegal immigrants be considered citizens of the U.S.  Right now America is spending an outrageous amount of money taking care of these illegal immigrants.  The more liberal side of politics believes that we should support these people regardless of legal status.  They want us to provide healthcare, education, ext. to people who are not even U.S. citizens.  This is a widely debated topic in the upcoming elections on what to do with these people.  The conservative view point is to first secure the border and then worry about getting rid of the illegal immigrants already within the U.S.

            Another problem is that the cost for a mass deportation of all these immigrants would be way too much.  It would cost around $43 billion to deport the approximate 390,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S.  With the government spending out of control as it is I feel that this is something that we can wait on.  I feel that spending should be focused on increase in the border security.  Hopefully with the increase in security there would be less cost in the future from having to deal with these immigrants. 

            It is more commonly known that illegal immigrants are notorious for taking jobs for very low wages, jobs that should go to American citizens.  There are approximately 7.2 million illegal immigrant workers in the workforce.  Especially now in today’s rough economy jobs are a scarcity and it’s not right for Americans not to be able to find jobs when illegal immigrants are taking them.  These jobs belong to American citizens and it is not fair to them that non-americans are taking these jobs away from them.

            Many immigrants are trying to find ways around the laws to become legal citizens.  A popular way is to have “anchor babies”.  This allows illegal immigrants to have babies in the U.S., who then become citizens which allows the parents to stay with them.  Because of this rule many immigrants are able to gain citizenship because they had a baby born on U.S. soil, and this is something I feel needs to be fixed as well.  In 2005 more than 380,000 anchor babies were born and were raised on taxpayer money.

            My blog will talk about all the different problems America is facing with illegal immigration.  I will show the different viewpoints in the political world and solutions that are being proposed.  If you would like some statistics that might shock you visit this site.

What Should Be Done

                So what needs to be done in order to regain control of our south western border?  Would it be better to have an increase in man power, increase in technological resources, or anything else?  To me the ideal situation would be to have roving death bots on the border protecting us from those trying to enter our country illegally, but we all know we don’t have the resources for anything like that.  I guess that will just have to wait a few years.  But something that can be done is increase the amount of agents sent to protect the border.  I know that the government has started to send National Guard troops to help out the cause.  With more men you can search larger areas quicker, reinforce a bigger area,  and overall just do a better job keeping our border safe.  I know that the army has drones that can be sent to fly overhead and recon a certain area.  I’m not sure how readily available this kind of technology is, but if the agents were able to use something like this in order to recon large areas of land in a short period of time.  I know that these ideas would require a lot of government spending, but as I have said before this spending is necessary, unlike majority of the government spending being done now. 

                I almost think that creating a big wall that goes across the border wouldn’t be a bad idea; it would actually be kind of cool.  The immigration problem has really gotten that bad though that ideas like that are coming into people’s minds.  The recessing economy for the past couple of years has actually helped with the immigration problem a little, no one wants to come somewhere where they can’t find a job, but what is going to happen if/when our economy starts to go back up.  We need to be ready for this because if that does happen illegal immigrants will start to pour back into America hoping to find work, and we need to be ready in case that does happen.

Illigal Immigration and Crime

Lately I have been thinking about the types of people who come into this country.  Many of the people who come here illegally are associated with some type of criminal activity.  After looking at some statistics I saw that of the 392,862 immigrants deported last year 195,772 were convicted of some sort of crime.  That is over half of the people deported.  Not only do these people come here illegally but they also create a more unsafe living environment for people in America.  The reason we need to increase border security is to keep people like this out of our country.  Border security is not only needed to keep illegal immigrants out, it is there to keep criminals out of our country.  The federal government needs to do more to protect its citizens from the vast number of criminals pouring in across the border illegally.  In order to help with the deportation effort of criminals, law enforcement can now run immigration status checks on all individuals who come through any kind of jail or court house.  I believe that this is a good idea in order to get these people out of our country, but think of the time and resources we waste in having to do this.  If we just kept these people from entering our country to start with then we wouldn’t need to worry about deporting them.

                I know that in many of the Mexican Border states, especially Arizona, the states are starting to make their own laws about immigration since the federal government has failed to adequately provide security for the border.  In the upcoming election people need to look for candidates who are looking to increase the security of the border.  I think it is sad when a state has to start making its own laws because the federal government has failed to provide the national security it has always promised its citizens.

Post 1

                Over the past few years I have watched the news and continuously see reports on the problem of illegal immigration into this country.  The government has failed to control this situation and I feel that things need to change.  What made me want to talk about this topic is a story that my grandfather told me about his experience with illegal immigrants.  My grandfather was hunting in Texas one summer and during his hunt a family of illegal immigrants ran across the field.  They were coming in from Mexico, and the ranch my grandfather was hunting on said they see people do that all the time.  This story just made me angry because it is so easy for people to come into this country illegally, and that has to change.  I have also watched the television show Border Patrol, which is a documentary on the lives of real border patrol officers.  What interested me was how hard these men and women work at keeping people out of this country, but have not received enough support from the government to completely control the situation.  The government has started taking steps in increasing the security of the Mexican/U.S. border by increasing the amount of border patrol agents to 17,057, which is way up from 6,315 which was in 1997.  I still feel like more needs to be done.   It is hard to say that the government needs to spend more money on the security of the border when government spending is already out of hand, but you have to look at the benefits that would come from increasing the security.  With an increase in border security there would hopefully be a decrease in the amount of illegal immigrants coming into America, therefore decreasing the amount of money spent on INS resources.  Increasing the spending now would hopefully decrease the amount of spending in the future.