I read a journal from my classmate—Joshua Waggoner’s blog this morning. On her blog—American Soup Talk, she published a piece of writing about the issue of illegal immigration.
In her opinion, she believe that illegal immigration must be a serious problem in the United States, and the US government should solve this problem immediately so that lives, money, and benefits of this country can be secured (protected). In summary, she argued that illegal immigrants should get penalty, and illegal immigration causes substantial harm to American citizens and legal immigrants.
I agree with her. In recent years, more and more illegal immigrants have crossed the U.S. border to work and to receive publicly-funded services, often with the aid of fraudulent documents. Maybe this way benefits some corporations and illegal immigrants, and they like to paint it as a victimless crime, but in fact, illegal immigration brings harmful results to American citizens and legal immigrants.
In my opinion, illegal immigration is a crime, for 4 reasons: 1) increasing terrorism, 2) increasing drug trafficking, 3) increasing unemployment rate for U. S. citizens and legal immigrants, and 4) making dramatic population growth. For example, illegal immigration causes over population. As a result, there is shortage of basic amenities, such as consuming already limited affordable housing and straining precious natural resources like water, energy, and forestland. Also, job competition by waves of illegal immigrants willing to work at much lower wages and working conditions depresses the wages of American workers. In addition, illegal immigration causes and enormous drain on public funds. According to the study of the costs of immigration by the National Academy of Sciences, if we continue to bring in endless numbers of poor and unskilled immigrants, the taxes paid by immigrants do not cover the cost of services received by them. As a result, American citizens and legal immigrants can not obtain high quality education, health care, and retirement security. Therefore, our government needs to end illegal immigration immediately and find out solutions to solve this serious problem.
In conclusion, Congress and the Executive Branch need to strengthen the three components of immigration control--deterrence, apprehension and removal, to ensure that people who enter the United States legally. This will be fair to American citizens and legal immigrants.
