Immigration Reform

After reading several blogs pertaining to the human side of immigration—that is, the consequences at a personal level of living in America as an illegal immigrant—I decided to look into arguments that call for immigration reform simply because it helps our economy. One of the key ideas addressed in the video below, and something I think is widely acknowledged, is that if all illegal immigrants were granted citizenship then they would all pay taxes which would reduce the budget deficit. Furthermore, immigrants in America are obviously consumers so they already contribute to our country’s GDP by spending money which further benefits the economy.

 

This video explains why immigration reform is necessary on the economic level, which I think is a very compelling argument. Unfortunately there is no mention of specifically how immigration is to be reformed to benefit the economy, only that some type of reform is necessary and it is up to our congressmen to get the ball rolling. I think they types of changes that are necessary include automatically legalizing anyone who entered the U.S. illegally as a child and I also believe the legalization process for those that entered the  U.S. illegally as adults should be straightforward and should cater to the fact that not all immigrants speak English. Side note: in general I believe that people need to be more accepting of people that don’t speak English. In other developed countries such as Germany or Japan it is more common for people to speak more than one language and even in Cameroon, Africa more than one language is spoken. Americans are very much set in their ways when it comes to language and this notion has often lead to the idea that if a Mexican immigrant can’t speak English then they don’t belong in America.

 If more people were aware of the current levels of migration out of America—specifically migration from America to Mexico—maybe the push for immigration reform would be stronger.  This video highlights the economic reasons for an immigration reform, and I think that fact that our country’s history is completely founded on immigrants and immigration demonstrates why immigration reform should be liberal and as reasonable inclusive and straightforward as possible.