Mingdong Chen
Freshman
composition
Ms. Nargiza
Matyakubova
9 November 2013
Argumentative
Essay
Immigrants should not have Faced Prejudice
Since the Immigration Reform and
Control Act were passed in 1986, the flow of immigration to the United States
has been gradually growing steadily. Those people are included legal
immigrants, undocumented immigrants or illegal immigrants, nonimmigrants, and
border crossers. Some immigrant reasons are to seek better opportunity of work,
to find refuge from poverty or political persecution, to create better lives for
the future of their children, and the most important is to get high education
and accomplish the Dream of America. Tracing back to the earliest immigration,
it was happened in 1620s when those people who are called the Pilgrims sailed
from England to America by a ship named Mayflower, and then they established
the earliest foundation of democratic government of America. So America is a
country which is definitely found and created by the immigrants.
However,
nowadays they oppositely receive unjust treatment of various discriminations in
every part of this American immigrant society. The early African-Americans
received serious racial discrimination in 1960s, they lived in the lowest level
of that society, and they had no certain rights to protect themselves. Even in
today’s society, the phenomenon of racial discrimination still exists. For
example, in the recent ABC talk show, a little kid’s respond to the question
asked by the show host Jimmy Kimmel that how America should pay its 1.3 trillion
back to China is that killing all people in china so the United States does not
have to pay its debts back to the nation. “That is interesting!” replied Jimmy.
This is extremely racial discrimination to the Chinese immigrants; they
perfectly do not care about how those Chinese people who sit in the front of
the TV think. Therefore, all immigrants should appeal to ban the discrimination
together for their races: all immigrants should earn equal treatments because
immigrants are essentially part of this society
Immigration, a term which is
explained to be the coming of people into a country of which they are not a
native in order to live and work there and America is widely considered to be
world’s largest immigration country immigrants favor. Immigration averaged
nearly one million annually from 1990s to 2000s, estimates for undocumented
aliens topped 400,000 by the turn of the 21st century; over 200 million
crossings (mostly along the Mexican border) are recorded each year (Reimer 9). Some
immigrants come to escape religious persecution. Many others are poor and
looking to improve their economic situation. Still others come to experience
greater freedom in the United States. The early immigrants to America lived in
bunk houses, worked hard in insanitary working environment, and the worst was
that they received different levels of discrimination from other countries’
immigrants because of racial differences, cultural differences, or educational
differences. What’s more, the undocumented immigrants received even more
serious discrimination in society compared with all, they paid huge amount of
money to the illegal immigration brokers taking a risk to cross border to
worked more than what they obtained, and their lives are in hiding because of
the lack of the certain documents with them, but the discrimination never let
them stop working and making contributions to America with positive attitudes..
Last but not least, they are the parts of formation of American society.
Immigrants are mainly essentially
labor forces of American society. In between 1850s to 1880s, there were
approximately 200,000 Chinese immigrants came to America to help build the
nation’s first transcontinental railroad, so did the Irish immigrants. For decades, immigrants
and their families have played a vital role in the U.S. labor force and economy
at large, Foreign-born workers comprise about 16
percent of the workforce, and immigrants account for nearly one-half of U.S.
labor force growth since the mid-1990s, and their contribution of economy toward the society is about 45
percent of total (Zavodny).
Someone consider foreign immigrants push Native
American out of jobs. Immigrants usually fill jobs that American cannot fill,
and mostly at the high and low ends of the skill spectrum. Immigrants are
presented not only in high-skilled field fields such as medicine, physics and
computer science, but also in lower-skilled sectors such as hotels and
restaurants, domestic service, construction and light manufacturing (Griswold).
Immigrants are strong
backbone of American economy. A recent American news
show that in the
top 500 American companies of 2012, 42% are found by the
new immigrants, the proportion of
first-generation immigrants was 19%,
the proportion of first-generation
immigrants’ children was 23%. These enterprises created more than 10 million jobs and 4.5 trillion in annual
revenue, accounting for about 30% of the nation's GDP in that year. Thus, the contribution of immigrants to American economy
is so large. According to Fact Set
data, in the top 25
technology companies of 2010’s American market, 60% of
the founders are the first generation
or second generation immigrants. Top three are Apple Inc., the founder Steve Jobs is
the second-generation immigrant of the ancestral home of Syria;
Google’s founder Sergey
Brin comes from the first-generation immigrant of the
former Soviet Union; IBM Hollerith’s
founder is the ancestral home of Germany's second-generation immigrant. Another example was a the latest
report by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, which demonstrated the increasing
number of immigrants in the workforce and higher wages drove much of the
economic growth in neighborhoods with immigrant-rich population. In 2011,
foreign-born New Yorkers contributed $210 billion in economic activity; it was
about 31 percent of New York City’s gross city product (Lam). These are
powerful evidence to support that immigrants are positive to American growth of
economy. “New York City is home to the nation’s largest and most diverse
population of immigrants and they play a vital role in building the city’s
economy,” said DiNapoli.
Anti-immigrants
consider that immigrants are a drain on government finances. It is true that
low-skilled immigrants and refugees tend to use welfare more than the typical “native
“ household, but the 1996’s Welfare Reform Act made it much more difficult for
newcomers to collect welfare. As a result, immigrants’ use of welfare has
declined in recent years along with overall welfare rolls (Griswold).
Anti-terrorists consider that immigration can bring unpredictable
terrorists at the same time. In the morning of Sept 11 2001, a planned attack
by Osama Bin Laden was happened so that the Twin Tower and the Pentagon were
attacked by planes, and total 2749 people died from accident. This is an attack
by the foreign powers. Another example is the Boston Marathon bombings accident
happened on April 15 2013, there were two pressure cooker bombs exploding and
killing 3 people and injuring about 264 people. “The terrorism threat comes
from illegal alien who are allowed to live in our midst, and that is a failure
of our immigration laws and our immigration officials,” said Phyllis Schlafly.
Obviously the U.S. government should regulate its border
to expel anyone who tries to commit terrorist actions; it does not matter with
letting many strange immigrants come to America, which is government’s failure
to keep the wrong people out (Griswold). We can reduce the number of
immigrations to zero and still not stop terrorist from slipping into the country
on nonimmigrant visas. In order to protect and defend our country, our
border-control system needs a reorientation of mission. We also need to carry
out essential missions to stop potentially dangerous people who cross the
borders. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies must work closely with the
State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. customs
should share real-time information about those wrong people without causing
intolerable delays at the border. More agents must be posted at ports of entry
to more thoroughly screen for high-risk travelers. So we can stop terrorists
from entering the United States without closing our borders or reducing the
number of hardworking, peaceful immigrants who settle here.
Works Cited
Phyllis Schlafly. The Threat of Terrorism is from Illegal
Aliens. 2001
David M Reimers. Immigration: Trends, Consequences and
Prospects for the United States. Ebsco publishing 2008
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