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Law For Life

Problems the American Society deals with as a result of immigration

Updated: Aug 18, 2020


Problems the American Society deals with as a result of immigration

For many decades, immigrants from all around the world, especially Mexico, Asia and Central America, have been migrating to the U.S with hopes of a better lifestyle. The inflow of illegal immigrants has fallen over the years; the millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S currently compromise mostly of those people who overstay their period of departure. Although, many have argued with researches that immigration strengthens the economy and benefits the Americans and their society, the cons of the massive influx of immigrants and those in the U.S-legal and illegal-exist and have some effects.

American workers

The concept of the effect on the native working population is quite simple to understand. The migration of about a million immigrants to the U.S each year results in an increase in the total workforce available. With a large supply of workers at hand, the organization and companies have to pay less in order to hire them. It is also true that lowly skilled foreign-borns willingly accept lower wages and work longer hours as long as they're earning. After observing trends from the previous half century, it was concluded that it was probable to see a decrease in wages by 3% of a particular worker group if that group faces an increase in workers by 10%. Therefore, the natives and mostly, lowly skilled natives lose job opportunities or get paid lower wages.

An example about the reaction of employers can be used to back this up. Around 10 years ago, a plant that processed chickens-Cinder Inc- went through checks by agents from the immigration department. About 75% of the company's workforce was taken into custody/deported over a single weekend. Employers reacted to this by placing job advertisements in local newspapers, offering higher wages than before.

Deportations and its financial consequences

The fate of illegal immigrants is deportation to their home country, by law. Illegal immigrants are those people who are staying in or have entered a country without appropriate legal papers and permission from the state. Unfortunately, a large proportion of the immigrant population-millions of people-in the U.S is undocumented. The Trump Administration has introduced some policies and passed some executive orders to the I.C.E to crack these immigrants down. Deportations, thousands of arrests and detentions have followed these crackdowns in different cities of the U.S.

The problem with this approach is somewhat moral and financial as well. The administration and handling costs related to the treatment of these illegal immigrants is quite high; many new I.C.E agents have been hired, detention facilities are overburdened and office costs have increased largely. Looking at such high costs-both human and monetary-it can be argued that letting these undocumented immigrants stay in the U.S would be much cheaper than arranging their deportations and arrests. However, Donald Trump still stands with his decision of ridding the U.S off illegal 'aliens'.

Increasing population

Many natives who oppose illegal immigrants-or immigrants in general-complain about the increasing number of foreigners seen in public transport facilities-trains and buses, overcrowding them. They also aren't very happy about the lower probability of their children earning scholarships at colleges as the increasing second generation immigrants also compete for it now.

Financial burden

Accommodating illegal/legal immigrants and their children costs money. The government pays for the schooling and medical expenses of these immigrants. Taxpayers and natives argue that these people are funded using their money, which, in their opinion, could've been utilized better elsewhere. They are also not in favor of millions of their taxes being spent on combatting illegal immigration-border security and administration of deportations.


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