Immigrants today aren’t really different from those of America’s past, they still come from all over the world to try and find a better place to live and raise a family. And just like in the past, we aren’t handling these prospective Americans, both illegal and legal, in the best of ways. Sure we aren’t completely banning all immigration from Mexico like we did with the Chinese, but we are still punishing those who come here legally. When someone mentions immigration to you, you probably think of illegal’s crossing our southern border and all the noise raised over our almost open policy of hiring said illegal’s. Americans tend to ignore our law abiding immigrants or just lump them in with those pouring in from Mexico. Those that come here legally should be entitled to all the protection and rights offered to every American citizen. In our nations past the equal treatment of legal immigrants hasn’t always been a top priority for us or our government. Most Americans fail to realize the pressures we put on legal immigrants and the amount of stress put on our government agencies by the problems this focus on the illegal immigrants has caused. I’m not saying illegal immigration isn’t a problem, it definitely is and its costing this nation a lot of money. What I’m saying is, we’re making the legally immigrating peoples pay for it.
In the New York times editorial “A Commitment to Citizenship” this problem is highlighted perfectly. The United States citizenship agency is struggling to keep up with its budget, because it has to pay for itself. No government help for the agency dealing with those who choose to come here the legal way. The agency makes the majority of its money from naturalization fees, the fee a prospective citizen must pay to be eligible for citizenship. Two years ago its cost was 400 dollars, today its 675 dollars. This raise in cost combined with the recent global economic slump has lead to a sharp decrease in the amount of legal immigration this country is seeing. If we were to relax our currently semi-strict process to enter this country it could do several things that might help in raising our legal immigrations and lowering our illegal ones. I have to admit an article by Bryan Pick had some really good ideas on how to ease our immigration problems. Just the easing of the strict policies would help, it would allow a freer of those coming here legally and it might make it easier to spot those coming here illegally with bad intent, aka terrorist and drug runners, according to Pick and I‘d have to whole heartedly agree. One of his best points is that we could offer voucher forms for language education as well as civic adult education, I happen to really like this one. I have no problem with others from another country, but I think you should at least be able to speak and read in the language of the country you plan on staying in.
On the illegal side of things government is being given out like proverbial candy on Halloween. In his blog Bryan Pick shows exactly where most of this money of going. Many people would think we are practically throwing at illegals once they are in our country and for the most part that’s untrue. As in Pick’s article illegal immigrants actually wait longer to use the healthcare system than almost all other Americans. However there is a place money is being thrown and that’s our school systems, according to Pick. There are over 1.6 million illegal immigrants under the age of 18 in the U.S., and the majority of those in California with its failing government budget. Here’s where the main problem starts, and Pick has a solution. In a normal public school environment the child would have to show a marked increase in his or her ability to speak English, the savings alone on not having to have bilingual teachers or books would go a long way to help with school budgets. Also pick goes on to state that we should actually do something about illegals who commit crimes in our country, instead of letting them stay until they’ve done major or done it repeatedly, we should deport them to their country of origin as swiftly as possible. When I say swiftly as possible it ties in with another problem that costing us money, the expensive prisons we house illegal immigrants in before deporting them back to their home countries, if we stopped doing this and instead just got them out of here it would end up saving us another nice chunk of change.
For all this nations short comings we are handling things better than we have, although in some cases we are facing problems we just didn’t see in the past. We aren’t banning them all as we did with the Asians, we aren’t sending them off to our wars like we did with the Irish in the Civil War, and we aren’t enslaving like we did with the Africans. Instead all things considered I think we’re doing ok, not great or how good we should be doing, but a resounding mediocre. Unless we’re the state of Arizona and then we might be taking it to far beyond the constitution, by giving our law enforcement the ability to stop and check the papers of anyone who appears to be of a Mexican decent. If only we could actually make up minds and make our politicians do something to stem the free flow of our money and efforts on this subject. We are a country founded by immigrants, our forefathers from Europe and those of the Indians who, according to what book you read, crossed over from the Mongolian steppes to get here. We’ll continue to be a country made up of immigrants until we cease to be a country, so hopefully our nation will atleast be dealing with this problem for many years to come.
-- Josh Cherry
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